How to plot Pandas datetime series in Seaborn distplot?

Question

I have a pandas dataframe with a datetime column. I would like to plot the distribution of the rows according to that date column, but I\'m currenty getting an unhelpful error.

Answer 1

You could convert the dates to Categorical type, and plot the resulting codes (which are integers). Then, label the x-ticks with the Date (as category).

import pandas as pd
import seaborn as sns

original_dates = [
    "2016-03-05", "2016-03-05", "2016-02-05",
    "2016-02-05", "2016-02-05", "2014-03-05"]
dates_list = pd.to_datetime(original_dates)

df = pd.DataFrame({"Date": dates_list})
df['date-as-cat'] = df['Date'].astype('category')  # new 
df['codes'] = df['date-as-cat'].cat.codes          # new 

print(df)
print(df.dtypes)

        Date date-as-cat  codes
0 2016-03-05  2016-03-05      2
1 2016-03-05  2016-03-05      2
2 2016-02-05  2016-02-05      1
3 2016-02-05  2016-02-05      1
4 2016-02-05  2016-02-05      1
5 2014-03-05  2014-03-05      0

Date           datetime64[ns]
date-as-cat          category
codes                    int8
dtype: object 

The date-as-code and date-as-category info is obtained like this:

x = df[['codes', 'date-as-cat']].drop_duplicates().sort_values('codes')
print(x)

   codes date-as-cat
5      0  2014-03-05
2      1  2016-02-05
0      2  2016-03-05