Make Better Bar Charts in Python using Pandas Plot

Nothing beats the bar chart for fast data exploration and comparison of variable values between different groups, or building a story around how groups of data are composed.

The advantage of bar charts (or “bar plots”, “column charts”) over other chart types is that the human eye has evolved a refined ability to compare the length of objects, as opposed to angle or area.

Luckily for Python users, options for visualisation libraries are plentiful, and Pandas itself has tight integration with the Matplotlib visualisation library, allowing figures to be created directly from DataFrame and Series data objects. This blog post focuses on the use of the DataFrame.plot functions from the Pandas visualisation API.