pandas histogram plot error: ValueError: num must be 1 <= num <= 0, not 1 - pandas

Question

I am drawing a histogram of a column from pandas data frame:
%matplotlib notebook
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib
df.hist(column='column_A', bins = 100)
but got the following errors:
62 raise ValueError(
63 "num must be 1 <= num <= {maxn}, not {num}".format(
---> 64 maxn=rows*cols, num=num))
65 self._subplotspec = GridSpec(rows, cols)[int(num) - 1]
66 # num - 1 for converting from MATLAB to python indexing
ValueError: num must be 1 <= num <= 0, not 1
Does anyone know what this error mean? Thanks!

Answer 1

Problem
The problem you encounter arises when column_A does not contain numeric data. As you can see in the excerpt from pandas.plotting._core below, the numeric data is essential to make the function hist_frame (which you call by DataFrame.hist()) work correctly.
def hist_frame(data, column=None, by=None, grid=True, xlabelsize=None,
xrot=None, ylabelsize=None, yrot=None, ax=None, sharex=False,
sharey=False, figsize=None, layout=None, bins=10, **kwds):
# skipping part of the code
# ...
if column is not None:
if not isinstance(column, (list, np.ndarray, Index)):
column = [column]
data = data[column]
data = data._get_numeric_data() # there is no numeric data in the column
naxes = len(data.columns) # so the number of axes becomes 0
# naxes is passed to the subplot generating function as 0 and later determines the number of columns as 0
fig, axes = _subplots(naxes=naxes, ax=ax, squeeze=False,
sharex=sharex, sharey=sharey, figsize=figsize,
layout=layout)
# skipping the rest of the code
# ...
Solution
If your problem is to represent numeric data (but not of numeric dtype yet) with a histogram, you need to cast your data to numeric, either with pd.to_numeric or df.astype(a_selected_numeric_dtype), e.g. 'float64', and then proceed with your code.
If your problem is to represent non-numeric data in one column with a histogram, you can call the function hist_series with the following line: df['column_A'].hist(bins=100).
If your problem is to represent non-numeric data in many columns with a histogram, you may resort to a handful options:
Use matplotlib and create subplots and histograms directly
Update pandas at least to version 0.25

Answer 2

usually is 0
mta['penn'] = [mta_bystation[mta_bystation.STATION == "34 ST-PENN STA"], 'Penn Station']
mta['grdcntrl'] = [mta_bystation[mta_bystation.STATION == "GRD CNTRL-42 ST"], 'Grand Central']
mta['heraldsq'] = [mta_bystation[mta_bystation.STATION == "34 ST-HERALD SQ"], 'Herald Sq']
mta['23rd'] = [mta_bystation[mta_bystation.STATION == "23 ST"], '23rd St']
#mta['portauth'] = [mta_bystation[mta_bystation.STATION == "42 ST-PORT AUTH"], 'Port Auth']
#mta['unionsq'] = [mta_bystation[mta_bystation.STATION == "14 ST-UNION SQ"], 'Union Sq']
mta['timessq'] = [mta_bystation[mta_bystation.STATION == "TIMES SQ-42 ST"], 'Ti