pandas plotting skipping xtick labels

Question

I am trying to display two pandas Series objects together, which works, except all the labels are not displayed.

I am trying to plot the two Series together like this:

plt.figure()
sns.set_style('ticks')
ts86['Gene'].value_counts().plot(kind='area')
l97['Gene'].value_counts().plot(kind='area')
sns.despine(offset=10)

But only one of the indexes is displayed.

Here are the two Series that I have:

one

TIIIh     25
TET2-2    24
IDH2      15
TIIIa     14
TIIIb     12
TIIIj     11
TIIIp      9
p53-1      9
SF3B1      8
TIIIe      8
KRAS-1     7
TIIIo      6
TIIId      6
TET2-1     6
GATA1      5
p53-3      5
HRAS       5
NRAS-2     4
IDH1       4
TIIIq      4
JAK2       4
TIIIc      4
TIIIf      3
TIIIg      3
TIIIm      3
KRAS-2     3
p53-2      3
TIIIk      3
TIIIn      2
DNMT3a     1

and

two

p53-1     17
p53-2      2
NRAS-2     2
p53-3      1
KRAS-2     1

Answer 1

Your output graph shows value_counts of 2 dataframes but obviously the index orders are no longer the same, so there is no way to show xticks at this point (e.g. highest count in df1 is TIIIh while that of df2 is p53-1 and you are trying to plot them together by preserving the order).

Let's simply merge df1 and df2 first (I named TIIIh and so on as id for merge key):

combi = pd.merge(ts86, l97, on='id', how='left')
combi = combi.set_index('id')

And then, plot each column and show all xticks:

ax = combi['Gene_x'].plot(kind='area', figsize=(10, 3))
combi['Gene_y'].plot(kind='area', figsize=(10, 3))
ax.set_xticks(range(combi.shape[0]))
ax.set_xticklabels(combi.index, rotation=90)

Now you get this:

Hope this helps.