This was posted onto stackoverflow but it seems more like a bug than anything:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/43242246/pandas-dataframe-groupby-failed-zooming-for-x-axis-ticks
Comment From: jorisvandenbossche
Smaller reproducible example:
In [43]: df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(4, 2), columns=['A', 'B'], index=pd.MultiIndex.from_product([[2012, 2013], [1,2]]))
In [44]: df
Out[44]:
A B
2012 1 0.144222 0.895911
2 0.885869 0.075482
2013 1 -0.312316 0.705149
2 -0.974501 1.443551
In [45]: df.plot()
Out[45]: <matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot at 0x7f3e6a262ef0>
The xtick label formatter cannot really handle a MultiIndex, as once you zoom in, the labels are put at the wrong place.
But the same is true when eg having a string index. So just a non-numerical / non-datetime index has this issue.
Comment From: jorisvandenbossche
This is a duplicate of https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/issues/7612