Multiple plots on one graph from DataFrame

Question

I have the following Dataframe:

    Food               Men     Women    Year
0   Apples as fruit    89.18    90.42   1994
1   Berries            84.21    81.73   1994
2   Grapes             88.79    88.13   1994
3   Melons             80.74    84.96   1994
4   Oranges, Total     85.66    89.77   1994
5   Other citrus fruit 79.82    80.64   1994
6   Stone fruit        88.95    89.55   1994
7   Tropical fruit     74.61    80.40   1994
8   Apples as fruit    90.86    91.21   1994
9   Berries            88.57    88.29   2004
10  Grapes             88.55    90.14   2004
11  Melons             79.72    80.99   2004
12  Oranges, Total     84.46    88.07   2004
13  Other citrus fruit 73.74    69.60   2004
14  Stone fruit        94.02    87.94   2004
15  Tropical fruit     74.58    85.85   2004

I am trying to create a line plot of Fruits vs Year or time with the Food as different line colors. Following the answer here and using groupby, I tried the following:

for i, group in fruits.groupby('Food'):
   plt.figure()
   group.plot(x='Year', y='Men', title=str(i))

But this yields 8 graphs with one line, or one graph for each fruit. I want one graph with a different line for each fruit. How would I do this with pandas, matplotlib or numpy? Also, the year column in currently an int so the plot includes years like 1996, 1998, 2000 etc, which I don't have data for. I meant for it to be a range like 1993-1994 or 2003-2004. Is there any way to omit them?

Answer 1

You would need to create the figure outside the loop. It is then best to supply a matplotlib axes to the Dataframe plot using ax keyword argument.

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

year=[1994,1994,1994,2000,2000,2000,2006,2006,2006]
fr = ["Apple", "Banana", "Cherry"]*3
men = [1,6,6,3,5,8,7,2,7]
fruits =pd.DataFrame({"Year" : year, "Food" : fr, "Men" : men})

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
for i, group in fruits.groupby('Food'):
    group.plot(x='Year', y='Men', ax=ax, label=group["Food"].iloc[0])
ax.set_title("Food")
ax.set_ylabel("Men")
#optionally only set ticks at years present in the years column
ax.set_xticks(fruits["Year"].unique())

plt.show()