Removing Year Decimals from x-axis in Pandas Histogram

Question

I am trying to plot the histogram of my data by year; however, the x-axis 'Year' is shown in decimal format (i.e. (2020.0, 2020.25 ...) not integer format.

Histogram

I extracted the year from the date string using

df['Year'] = pd.DatetimeIndex(df['INCI_DATE']).year

then plotted using pandas hist command

hist = df.Year.hist(bins=3, figsize=(10,10))

I tried converting the 'Year' column to int, but get the same results. df.Year = df.Year.astype(int)

How can I get have the years in integer format only?

Answer 1

If you want to see just the years, don't try change it to year only format. Leave it as datetime and plot it. Matplotlib can show it in the format you need. You can use set_major_locator() and set_major_formatter() for this. Below is the updated code... Hope this is what you are looking for...

## You can update INCI_DATE as datetime, or create a new column... 
df['Year'] = pd.DatetimeIndex(df['INCI_DATE'])#.year
hist = df.Year.hist(bins=3, figsize=(10,4)) 

import matplotlib.dates as mdates
hist.xaxis.set_major_locator(mdates.YearLocator())   #to get a tick every 1 year
hist.xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter('%Y'))     #Show only Year

Output plot