MATLAB vectors, angles, plots - matlab

Question

I apologize for the ambiguous title, but I am not entirely sure how to phrase this one. So bear with me.
I have a matrix of data. Each column and row represents a certain vector (column 1 = row 1, column 2 = row 2, etc.), and every cell value is the cosine similarity between the corresponding vectors. So every value in the matrix is a cosine.
There are a couple of things I want to do with this. First, I want to create a figure that shows all of the vectors on it. I know the cosine of the angle between every vector, and I know the magnitude of each vector, but that is the only information I have - is there some algorithm I can implement that will run through all of the various pair-wise angles and display it graphically? That is, I don't know where all the vectors are in relation to each other, and there are too many data points to do this by hand (e.g. if I only had three vectors, and the angles between them all were 45, 12, and 72 degrees it would be trivial). So how do I go about doing this? I don't even have the slightest idea what sort of mathematical function I would need to do this. (I have 83 vectors, so that's thousands of cosine values). So basically this figure (it could be either 2D or multidimensional, and to be honest I would like to do both) would show all of the vectors and how they relate to each other in space (so I could compare both angles and relative magnitudes).
The other thing I would like to do is simpler but I am having a hard time figuring it out. I can convert the cosine values into Cartesian coordinates and display them in a scatter plot. Is there a way to connect each of the points of a scatter plot to (0,0) on the plot?
Finally, in trying to figure out how to do some of the above on my own I have run into some inconsistencies. I calculated the mean angles and Cartesian coordinates for each of the 83 vectors. The math for this is easy, and I have checked and double-checked it. However, when I try to plot it, different plotting methods give me radically different things. So, if I plot the Cartesian coordinates as a scatter plot I get this:
If I plot the mean angles in a compass plot I get this:
And if I use a quiver plot I get something like this (I transformed this a little by shifting the origin up and to the right just so you can see it better):
Am I doing something wrong, or am I misunderstanding the plotting functions I am using? Because these results all seem pretty inconsistent. The mean angles on the compass plot are all <30 degrees or so, but on the quiver plot some seem to exceed 90 degrees, and on the scatter plot they extend above 30 as well. What's going on here?
(Here is my code:)
cosine = load('LSA.txt');
[rows,columns]=size(cosine);
p = cosine.^2;
pp = bsxfun(#minus, 1, p);
sine = sqrt(pp);
tangent = sine./cosine;
Xx = zeros(rows,1);
Yy = zeros(rows,1);
for i = 1:columns
x = cosine(:,i);
y = sine(:,i);
Xx(i,1) = sum(x) * (1/columns);
Yy(i,1) = sum(y) * (1/columns);
end
scatter(Xx,Yy);
Rr = zeros(rows,1);
Uu = zeros(rows,1);
for j = 1:rows
Rr(j,1) = sqrt(Xx(j,1).^2 + Yy(j,1).^2);
Uu(j,1) = atan2(Xx(j,1),Yy(j,2));
end
%COMPASS PLOT
[theta,rho] = pol2cart(Uu,1);
compass(theta,rho);
%QUIVER PLOT
r = 7;
sx = ones(size(cosine))*2; sy = ones(size(cosine))*2;
pu = r * cosine;
pv = r * sine;
h = quiver(sx,sy,pu,pv);
set(gca, 'XLim', [1 10], 'YLim', [1 10]);

Answer 1

You can exactly solve this problem. The dot product calculates the cosine. This means your matrix is actually M=V'*V
This should be solvable through eigenvalues. And you said you also have the length.
Your only problem - as your original matrix the vectors will be 83 dimensional. Not easy to plot in 2 or 3 dimensions. I think you are over simplifying by just using the average angle. There are some techniques called dimensionality reduction - here's a toolbox. I would suggest a sammon projection on 1-cosine (as this would be the distance of points on the unit ball) to calculate the vectors for such a plot.

Answer 2

In the quiver plot, you are plotting all of the data in the cosine and sine matrices. In the other plots, you are only plotting the means. The first two plots appear to match up, so no problem there.
A few other things. I notice that in
Uu(j,1) = atan2(Xx(j,1),Yy(j,2));
Yy(j,2) is not actually defined, so it seems like this code should fail.
Furthermore, you could define Yy and Xx as:
Xx = mean(cosine,2);
Yy = mean(sine,2);
And also get rid of the other for loop:
Rr = sqrt(Xx.^2 + Yy.^2)
Uu = atan2(Xx,Yy)
I still have to think about your first question, but I hope this was helpful.