Matlab line plot overlaps axis when values are zero - matlab

I have plotted a figure with multiple lines on it, and I have noticed that the lines for the plot overlap the x-axis when they are zero. Is there a way that I can essentially get the x-axis to plot on the top, rather than the lines?
Here is a MWE that does the same thing (I haven't put my exact code up as my dataset is quite big).
xdata=1:1:10;
ydata=[1;0.8;0.6;0.4;0.2;0;0;0;0;0];
line(xdata,ydata)
After I plot the lines (multiple per plot in my case), I do various other things with the axes so I get what I need (including adding a secondary set of axes). None of this seems to make any difference as to whether the x-axis is plotted on top of the lines or not.
I did have a search online but couldn't find anything to do with this.

The answer given by Luis is a nice workaround, but the official way to solve this problem is to use the layer property of the axis object, see the manual. To plot the axis on top of the data you do
set(gca,'Layer','top')
To automatically do this for all your plots, you can put the following line in your startup.m:
set(0,'DefaultAxesLayer','top')
This kind of answers you do not make up yourself, I only discovered this trick after asking more or less the same question on comp.soft-sys.matlab many years ago. See also this SO question.

After having plotted all your lines, plot a line on the x axis with the same color as the axis:
hold on
a = axis; %// gives xmin xmax ymin ymax
cx = get(gca,'Xcolor'); %// color of x axis
plot([a(1) a(2)], [a(3) a(3)], 'color', cx)
If the lines also overlap with the y axis and you also want that axis to appear on top, add the following:
cy = get(gca,'Ycolor'); %// color of y axis
plot([a(1) a(1)], [a(3) a(4)], 'color', cy)

Related

Linear and Non-linear axis in Matlab

I'm the MatLab newbie and I need some help to create a linear and non-linear axis in one chart.
I need to make chart with 2 different X-axes. One X-axis displays 1000/T at the bottom and the second X-axis displays a T at the top of the chart.
Example figure:
Do you have any idea how to solve this problem in MatLab?
Thanks.
This can be done by simply creating a second axes object at the same place as the first. Let's first create some data:
x1 = 1:0.1:3.5;
x2 = 1./x1;
y = (0.5*(x1-2)).^3;
Now we can create a normal plot with the first axes, and get the axes handle:
plot(x1,y,'-r');
ax(1) = gca;
Then we create the second axes object, at the same position as the first, and make the color none so it is transparent and the plot from below is still visible. As this adds a second Y axis too, we simply remove the Y ticks of the second axis.
ax(2) = axes('Position',ax(1).Position,'XAxisLocation','top','Color','none');
set(ax(2),'YTick',[]);
Now lets just format the second X axis as we like. Let's set the limits to the minimum and maximum of the x2 vector, and make it logarithmic:
set(ax(2),'XLim',[min(x2),max(x2)]);
set(ax(2),'XScale','log');
Now we still have the problem that the XTicks of ax(1) are also displayed at the top, and the XTicks of ax(2) are displayed at the bottom. This can be fixed by removing the box around the existing axes and creating a third axis without any ticks but with a box.
box(ax(1),'off');
box(ax(2),'off');
ax(3) = axes('Position',ax(1).Position,'XTick',[],'YTick',[],'Box','on','Color','none');
Now finally we can link the axes to be able to zoom correctly
linkaxes(ax);
And that should be it...
There is documentation for having a graph with two y-axes on the Mathworks website . .
http://de.mathworks.com/help/matlab/creating_plots/plotting-with-two-y-axes.html
It should be trivial to covert the concepts to the x-axis.

How to set x and y values when using bar3 in Matlab?

Quick version
How can I control the x- and y-values for a 3-d bar plot in Matlab?
Details
Say we have an 10 x 20 data matrix and we plot it using bar3, and we want to set the x- and y-values. For instance:
foodat = rand(10,20);
xVals = [5:14];
yVals = [-3:16];
bar3(xVals, foodat);
xlabel('x'); ylabel('y');
Is there a way to feed it the yVals as well? Otherwise the y axes always defaults to [1:N].
Note I don't just want to change the labels using XTickLabel and YTickLabel. I need to change the actual values on the axes, because I am plotting multiple things in the same figure. It isn't enough to just change how the (wrong) axis ticks are labeled. So this is different from issues like this:
How can I adjust 3-D bar grouping and y-axis labeling in MATLAB?
Other things I have tried
When I try changing the xvals with:
set(gca,'XTick', xVals)
set(gca,'YTick', yVals)
The values are taken in, but actually show up on the wrong axes, so it seems x and y axes are switched using bar3. Plus, it is too late anyway as the bar graph was already plotted with the wrong x- and y-values, so we would end up giving ticks to empty values.
Note added
Matlab tech support just emailed me to let me know about the user contributed function scatterbar3, which does what I want, in a different way than the accepted answer:
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/1420-scatterbar3
I found a way of doing it. Ill give you a piece of code, then you'll need to "tidy up" , mainly the axis limits and the Xticks, as bar3 does set up the Xticks inside, so if you want others you'll need to set them manually yourself.
So the trick here is to get the Xdata from the bar3 handle. The thing here is that it seems that there is a handle for each row of the data, so you need to iterate for each of them. Here is the code with the current output:
foodat = rand(20,10);
xVals = [5:14];
yVals = [-3:16];
% The values of Y are OK if called like this.
subplot(121)
bar3(yVals, foodat);
subplot(122)
h=bar3(yVals, foodat);
Xdat=get(h,'XData');
axis tight
% Widdth of barplots is 0.8
for ii=1:length(Xdat)
Xdat{ii}=Xdat{ii}+(min(xVals(:))-1)*ones(size(Xdat{ii}));
set(h(ii),'XData',Xdat{ii});
end
axis([(min(xVals(:))-0.5) (max(xVals(:))+0.5) min(yVals(:))-0.5, max(yVals(:))+0.5])
Note: Y looks different but is not.
As you can see now the X values are the ones you wanted. If you'd want other size than 1 for the intervals between them you'd need to change the code, but you can guess how probably!

How to break the axis in matlab

How could one break the x axis in the same figure (not the subplot function)?
You can see an example in line graph in panel b in the following picture, one single row data have been split into three parts as well as the x axis.
the question is how this plot can be achieved in matlab.
(like the panel b in this figure)
Ill leave you an exmaple here using surf.
The trick is inserting nans wherever you want the lines to appear "empty"
z=peaks(100);
% If you want to delete a certain amount of rows/cols
z2=z;
z2(:,10:15)=NaN;
z2(:,50:55)=NaN;
z2(:,75:80)=NaN;
% If you want to separate you data without deleting anything
z3=z;
z3=[z3(:,1:15) nan(size(z3,1),5) z3(:,16:75) nan(size(z3,1),5) z3(:,75:100) ];
% This last bit is only for plotting, so you can try it in your computer
subplot(131)
title('Original')
surf(z,'edgecolor','interp')
axis off
view(2)
axis equal
subplot(132)
title('Deleted columns')
surf(z2,'edgecolor','interp')
axis off
view(2)
axis equal
subplot(133)
title('Separatedd data')
surf(z3,'edgecolor','interp')
axis off
view(2)
axis equal
There are a couple of utilities on the File Exchange that allow you to do that:
Break X Axis
BreakXAxis

Distance between axis number and axis in MATLAB figure

I struggle a little bit with overlapping axis numbers of the y and x axis like it is shown in the image. I'd like to keep the size of the numbers and therefore think that simply shifting the numbers away from the axis itself would be an appropriate way to handle this issue.
Is there a possibility to do that?
Thanks in advance,
Joe
Here is a little workaround using text annotations. Basically you clear the current XTick labels and replace them with similar labels, but you can specify the distance from the axis:
clc
clear
close all
x = 1:20;
hPlot = plot(x,sin(x));
set(gca,'xaxisLocation','top');
set(gca,'XTickLabel',[]); %// Clear current XTickLabel
ylim = get(gca,'YLim'); %// Get y limit of the plot to place your text annotations.
for k = 2:2:20
text(k,ylim(2)+0.1,num2str(k),'HorizontalAlignment','Center') %// Play with the 'ylim(1) -0.1' to place the label as you wish.
end
Giving this:
Of course now it's exaggerated and you can do the same for the y axis if you want (using the 'XLim' property of the current axis,gca).

Making an accurate colorbar for a simple plot

I am trying to make a simple plot (for this example doing a plot of y=x^2 will suffice) where I want to set the colors of the points based on their magnitude given some colormap.
Following along my simple example say I had:
x = 1:10;
y = x.^2;
Use gscatter(x,y,jet(10)); legend hide; colorbar which produces a plot with the points colored but the colorbar does not agree with the colored values. (Can't post picture as this is my first post). Using a caxis([1,100]) command gives the right range but the colors are still off.
So I have two questions:
(1) How can I fix the colors to fit to a colorbar given a range? In my real data, I am looking at values that range from -50 to 50 in some instances and have many more data points.
(2) I want to create a different plot with the same points (but on different axes) and I want the colors of each point on this new plot to have the same colors as their counterparts in the previous plot. How can I, programmatically, extract the color from each point so I can plot it on two different sets of axes?
I would just move the points into a matrix and do an imagesc() command but they aren't spaced as integers or equally so simple scaling wouldn't work either.
Thanks for any help!
Regarding you first question, you need to interpolate the y values into a linear index to the colormap. Something like:
x = 1:10;
y = x.^4;
csize = 128;
cmap = jet(csize);
ind = interp1(linspace(min(y),max(y),csize),1:csize,y,'nearest');
scatter(x,y,14,cmap(ind,:),'filled')
colorbar
caxis([min(y) max(y)])
Using interp1 in this case is an overkill; you could calculate it directly. However, I think in this way it is clearer.
I think it also answers your 2nd question, since you have the index of the color of each data point, so you can use it again in the same way.