Fix Python – Plotting categorical data with pandas and matplotlib

Question

Asked By – Ivan

I have a data frame with categorical data:

     colour  direction
1    red     up
2    blue    up
3    green   down
4    red     left
5    red     right
6    yellow  down
7    blue    down

I want to generate some graphs, like pie charts and histograms based on the categories. Is it possible without creating dummy numeric variables? Something like

df.plot(kind='hist')

Now we will see solution for issue: Plotting categorical data with pandas and matplotlib


Answer

You can simply use value_counts on the series:

df['colour'].value_counts().plot(kind='bar')

enter image description here

This question is answered By – Alexander

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