Let's break down why your plot isn't showing up and fix it step by step:

Key Issues in Your Current Code #

1. No actual plot content: You’re setting tick labels but never drawing any chart (like a line, bar, or scatter plot). Matplotlib has nothing to render when you call plt.show()!
2. Incorrect plt.xticks usage: The first argument to plt.xticks() should be the position coordinates on your x-axis (e.g., index values, or specific x positions), not just the month numbers. If your x-axis uses dataframe indices or dates instead of 1-12, your tick positions won’t align with the chart’s range.
3. Redundant date processing: Splitting Date into Year/Month/Day and manually stitching MM_DD_str is unnecessary—Pandas has built-in tools for this.

Corrected Solution #

Step 1: Simplify Date Processing

First, clean up how you handle dates to avoid errors and make the code cleaner:

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Ensure your Date column is a datetime type first
df['Date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date'])

# Extract month and MM-DD string in one line each
df['Month'] = df['Date'].dt.month
df['MM_DD_str'] = df['Date'].dt.strftime('%m-%d')  # More reliable than manual string concatenation

Step 2: Plot Your Data First

You need to draw a chart before setting ticks. For example, if you want to plot a column (like Sales or Value) against months:

# Example: Plot aggregated monthly data (adjust based on your actual data)
monthly_data = df.groupby('Month')['Your_Target_Column'].mean()  # Aggregate by month (mean, sum, etc.)

# Draw the plot
plt.plot(monthly_data.index, monthly_data.values)

Step 3: Set X-Axis Ticks Correctly

Now align your tick positions with the actual x-axis values (here, the month numbers 1-12) and add the month abbreviations:

month_labels = ['Jan','Feb','Mar','Apr','May','Jun','Jul','Aug','Sep','Oct','Nov','Dec']
plt.xticks(ticks=range(1, 13), labels=month_labels)

Step 4: Add Context & Show the Plot

Finish with labels and a title to make the plot meaningful:

plt.title('Monthly Data Trend')
plt.xlabel('Month')
plt.ylabel('Your Metric Name')
plt.show()

What If You’re Plotting Raw Daily Data? #

If you’re plotting daily data instead of aggregated monthly data, you’ll want to set ticks at the first day of each month (or specific positions) instead of using month numbers directly. Here’s a quick example:

# Plot daily data
plt.plot(df['Date'], df['Your_Target_Column'])

# Set ticks to first day of each month, with abbreviated labels
month_ticks = pd.date_range(start=df['Date'].min(), end=df['Date'].max(), freq='MS')
plt.xticks(ticks=month_ticks, labels=month_ticks.strftime('%b'), rotation=45)
plt.show()

内容的提问来源于stack exchange，提问作者Krishna Girish