Equally spaced x-value for values that are not equally spaced - matlab

Question

I'm trying to display a discrete plot with values on the x-axis that are not equally space but I want them to appear equally spaced. I would like a stem plot with the first stick not on the y-axis, and I'd also like to have an horizontal dashed line at y=1.
So far here is what I tried.
x = [10 50 150 3000];
y = [.6 .754 .853 .954];
xv = [1 2 3 4];
stem(xv,y);
set(gca,'XTickLabel',x);
Unfortunately, this is not what I expected. The value on the x-axis are not right and the sticks start on the y-axis and end on the figure edge.
How can I fix this?

Answer 1

EDIT: I initially forgot the horizontal dashed line. Added this.
You just need two tiny additions:
x = [10 50 150 3000];
y = [.6 .754 .853 .954];
xv = [1 2 3 4];
stem(xv, y);
xlim([min(xv)-1 max(xv)+1]); % <--
set(gca, 'xtick', xv); % <--
set(gca, 'xticklabel', x);
You (also) need to explicitly set the xtick option, so that only these ticks are drawn, and no other.
With xlim, you can manipulate the x-axis limits. (Left and right limit might be modified to your needs.)
To add the horizontal dashed line, just add the following at the end:
hold on;
plot([min(xv)-1 max(xv)+1], [1 1], 'k--');
hold off;
(Start and end points of the line might be modified to your needs.)
From Matlab R2018b on, you could also use yline.
The output then looks like this:

Answer 2

When you have a sequence of values that you want to plot equally spaced without any special treatment to what each value actually is, you're essentially defining a set of categories.
MATLAB is good at handling these nicely without any extra trickery to lay them out uniformly on your axes if you declare the values explicitly as categorical.
All you need, therefore, is:
x = [10 50 150 3000];
y = [.6 .754 .853 .954];
stem(categorical(x),y);
yline(1,'--');
ylim([0 1.5]) % Make some space on the y-axis so the horizontal line doesn't sit on the top edge