Scatter plot in Matlab with x-axis ticks not equidistant

Question

Consider the following scatter plot in Matlab

A=[1 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 0 0 0 2 1 200 300]';
xRange = 0: max(A);  
prob=zeros(size(xRange,2),1);
for r=1:size(xRange,2)
prob(r) = sum(ismember(A,xRange(r)))/size(A,1); 
end

scatter(xRange,prob, 'b');  
xlim([-2 max(A)+2])
ylim([-0.5 1.5])

I want to change the way the scatter looks like in order to make it more clear: the idea is to put the following ticks on the x-axis

[-0.5 0 1 2 3 301]

but the tricky part is that they should be equidistant so that I can zoom on the part of the scatter plot with higher values of prob .

Any idea?

Answer 1

One way to achieve this is to transform the data to a new scale using interpolation. Let's say you want the data values

tickVal = [-0.5 0 1 2 3 301];

to appear at the graphical positions

tickPos = 0 : 5;

Determine the graphical positions for all the data by interpolation, and plot the transformed data:

xTransformed = interp1(tickVal, tickPos, xRange);
scatter(xTransformed, prob, 'b');  
xlim([min(tickPos), max(tickPos)])
ylim([-0.5 1.5])

Now we have to make sure that the ticks do not reflect the transformed, but the original data values:

set(gca, 'XTick', tickPos)
set(gca, 'XTickLabel', num2cell(tickVal))

The result looks like this:

Is this what you want?