Feature request: Categorical plotting

[michaelaye]

In the case of the index being a DateTimeIndex, I think there's a nice easy default case for plotting a categorical column: Let each category assume one value on the y-axis (user-providable, or range(len(categories)) by default) and plot a symbol ('*' by default maybe) at every point in time the categorical value has an entry. The y-axis tick labels should be the categorical values of course.
This can provide nice overviews in astronomy or other remote sensing sciences for example to indicate what kind of observation happened when and in what sequence. Or which of some set of lab experiments was executed when.

What do you guys think?

[jreback]

can you show a (hacked) example of what you mean?

[michaelaye]

So, I got through most of it, until I was stuck on how to control the ticklabels. Searching Google brought up this person's gist which basically exactly does what I asked for:

https://gist.github.com/amanahuja/0c2b6f086eed9d6c2fe0

My version is prettier (due to extra spaces for the y-axis and bigger symbols), but less general as I don't automatically determine the integers via a range over the set of categorical values:

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gist/michaelaye/3ddb6fbc625617e6a663

[shoyer]

It looks like seaborn.stripplot will handle plotting categorical data along one axis: mwaskom/seaborn#410

[jreback]

looks sexy!

[TomAugspurger]

Going to close this in favor of more specific issues. The basics are working now (bar and scatter).