Plot elapsed time on x axis using date indexed time-series data

In my pandas dataframe, my time series data is indexed by absolute time (a date of format YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS.nnnnn):

2017-01-04 16:25:25.143493    58
2017-01-04 16:25:26.145494    62
2017-01-04 16:25:27.147495    57
2017-01-04 16:25:28.149496    51
2017-01-04 16:25:29.151497    61

How can I plot this data such that the x-axis of my plots is an increasing value of some interval of seconds (e.g, “0 10 20 30 40 50”) relative to the timestamp of my first sample ? Do I need to use a Period, or convert to a frequency using asfreq() ? Or should I be using a DateFormatter ?

The documentation is a bit confusing and there don’t seem to be any good examples – most of the time series examples seem to revolve around coarse intervals such as months or years.

Answer

You can convert your datetimeindex to a timedeltaindex and then plot.

df.index = df.index - df.index[0]
df.plot()