Matplotlib displays several dark lines along the x axis

Question

Below is the plot. Dark lines cover the x axis, and for some reason it seems like I can't debug this. I am trying to display two columns from a data framework, a 3-dimensional SMA price versus time, as can be seen from the code below.

This is the result of this code.

import datetime

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
from binance.client import Client

BASE = "ETH"
QUOTE = "USDT"
MARKET = BASE + QUOTE

client = Client("vitalik",
                "buterin")

klines = client.get_historical_klines(MARKET, Client.KLINE_INTERVAL_15MINUTE, "31 Dec, 2017", "13 Jan, 2018")

# temporary fix

for kline in klines:
    kline[0] = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(
        int(kline[0] / 1000)
    ).strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
    kline[6] = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(
        int(kline[6] / 1000)
    ).strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')

df = pd.DataFrame(klines,
                  columns=["open_time", "open", "high", "low", "close", "volume", "close_time", "quote_asset_volume",
                           "trades", "base_volume", "quote_volume", "ignore"])

df['sma_3'] = df["close"].rolling(window=3).mean()

print(df.dtypes)

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 6))
ax.xaxis_date()

plt.xticks(rotation=90)
plt.xlabel("Date")
plt.ylabel("Price")
plt.title(MARKET)
plt.plot_date(x=df["close_time"], y=df["sma_3"], fmt="r-")
plt.show()

Result print(df.dtypes):

open_time              object
open                   object
high                   object
low                    object
close                  object
volume                 object
close_time             object
quote_asset_volume     object
trades                  int64
base_volume            object
quote_volume           object
ignore                 object
sma_5                 float64
sma_3                 float64
dtype: object

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank.

Answer 1

I think there are too many x tags, so you need to set them to invisible:

spacing = 10
visible = ax.xaxis.get_ticklabels()[::spacing]
for label in ax.xaxis.get_ticklabels():
    if label not in visible:
        label.set_visible(False)

plt.show()

Answer 2

You use rows as quantity to plot the x-axis. Therefore, each point will receive its own label. The accumulation of all these labels looks like "dark lines".

, datetime , .

, binance, .strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') .