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March 3rd, 2008

Advanced MATLAB: Subplots

The distinction between MATLAB Basics and Advanced MATLAB is a somewhat arbitrary distinction. The heuristic I use is “If I knew it before I came to The MathWorks, it is basic.” It is as good of a rule as any.

Some might argue this is a more basic post, but the inclusion of the gotcha and the use of property value pairs made this an advanced topic in my mind.

This short video shows how to put multiple subplots on a figure. Axes of different sizes can be laid out. The use of the position property is covered. A common gotcha is shown also where one axis overlapping another will delete the first.

By Doug Hull

16:51 UTC | Posted in Advanced MATLAB, PodCast, Video | Permalink | 19 Comments »

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19 Responses to “Advanced MATLAB: Subplots”

Doug replied on March 5th, 2008 at 14:03 UTC :

It was just pointed out that there is a typo at two minutes into the video. The title of the subplot on the right should be:

h=subplot(‘position’, [0.6 0.1 0.3 0.8])

Sorry!
Doug
Antunes replied on March 9th, 2008 at 14:29 UTC :

Hi,

Could you please give code to plot say 2 subplots side-by-side with the axes obeying the golden ratio?

thanks
a.
Doug replied on March 10th, 2008 at 07:50 UTC :

Antunes,

You should be able to do that with the ‘position’ property value pair. Just get the length and width in ratio and then position appropriately.

Doug
Bassam Awad replied on April 24th, 2008 at 09:04 UTC :

Hello,

I am trying to plot data in 393 plots with each figure include 25 plots. Any help is really appreciated.
Doug replied on April 24th, 2008 at 09:48 UTC :

Bassam,

That seems a little extreme to have 393 plot windows open. Having more than a dozen windows open in a Windows OS seems difficult to manage. I would try to think of a more effective way to display your data.

Maybe a GUI that allows you to select the graph you are interested in would be better. Maybe an animation is more what you need.

Doug
Dimitrij replied on June 6th, 2008 at 12:29 UTC :

thanks for the hint: I finally understood the “position” command applied to subplot, and that dimensions are given in percentage of figure width and height.
Fikri replied on July 28th, 2008 at 22:21 UTC :

Hi Doug,

got a simple question here, I’m making an interface for an image compression project. I needed to generate several subplots for the histogram, but here lies the problem. After generating all the subplots (which I put inside a panel, not axes) I simply can’t remove/clear/reset those subplots, which I need to do to make my ‘Clear’ pushbutton works as it is assigned to do.

a quick reply would be nice..

regards

Fikri
Bob replied on July 29th, 2008 at 05:51 UTC :

Fikri, see CLA.
jitendra replied on August 12th, 2008 at 05:45 UTC :

Hai Doug

I need your help in plotting a time-series data set and in the form of sub-plots.My domain size is 362 X 181 and like that there are 12 data sets.I need to plot all these 12 data sets of same dimension and animate later.
I need to make a script so that,it is operational.

I strucked from last four days to do this.
Thanking you in advance

regards
jitendra
Doug replied on August 12th, 2008 at 10:40 UTC :

jitendra,

I am not sure I understand your question. Please contact support for help.

Doug
S. G. Poss replied on May 16th, 2009 at 07:40 UTC :

With this nice demo, I now know what my problem is (something is overlaping), causing the first title not to be displayed and all titles moved up one histogram, with the last without a title.

The question is: how do you solve this problem?

I’ve shortened the titles as much as possible, but to no avail?

Suggestions?

The property section of the subplots is not thorough in the documentation and I note that the relative order of property statements can also produce bilwildering results.

Looks like an area that needs some work or at least more documentation to allow workers to work around such problems.

Thank you.
Doug replied on May 18th, 2009 at 14:29 UTC :

S.G.

I am not sure what you are talking about. It is much better for us to be able to help if you can show the shortest code snippet that will reproduce the behavior.

Thanks,
Doug
Rashmish replied on May 27th, 2009 at 06:48 UTC :

Hi Doug,

I have a problem in Matlab, and I hope you can help me with it. I am solving a Differential Equation in Matlab using Matlab’s own functions, for different values of some parameters. For some values of the parameter, it takes too long and I stop the program by a Ctrl-C manually, and then change the parameter.
Is there a way to automate this? i.e., the program should itself figure out that it took more than say some specific amount of time and so it should move to the next parameter.
I hope you got the question.
Your comments would be greatly appreciated !
Thanks in advance.

Rashmish
Steve L replied on May 28th, 2009 at 16:39 UTC :

Rashmish,

There’s no “timeout” capability for the ODE solvers. However, it sounds like the stiffness of your ODEs may depend on the parameters. Cleve wrote a column on ODEs and stiffness here:

http://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/news_notes/clevescorner/may03_cleve.html

You should try switching your program to use a stiffer solver to try to reduce the amount of time it takes to solve the ODE when it’s stiff. There’s a table in the function reference page for the ODE solvers that describes which solvers are stiff solvers and which aren’t.

http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/ref/ode113.html?BB=1

If you’re currently using ODE45, try ODE15S or ODE23S.
Rashmish replied on October 14th, 2009 at 04:36 UTC :

I finished my work by the manual bull-work, but it wd still be helpful to know if there is any way at all. I am solving a BVP; I don’t know if your comments on stiffness would still help. Do you have some other suggestions about my problem?

Thanks
Don replied on March 23rd, 2010 at 18:36 UTC :

Can anyone tell me how to create a subplot of 4-6 plots using pre-existing figure? I have the figures in my current directory ready to go but I can’t get them (copy, import???) into a subplot so they are all together. Any help would be great!! Thank you

Don
Doug replied on March 24th, 2010 at 20:33 UTC :

@Don,

You can reparent the axes that have the plots. The axes have a property, ‘parent’. set that property to the new figure and then change the position to whatever you want.

Doug
fabian replied on May 19th, 2010 at 23:49 UTC :

hi doug,

is it possible to create subplots within a subplot?
as an example, this is what i mean:
```
for i=1:25
    subplot(5,5,i)   %this would define the "big" plot

    subplot(2,1,1)  % this would be a subplot within the bigger subplot
    imagesc(x(i))
    subplot(2,1,2)
    imagesc(y(i))
end
```
each subplot-subplot would consists of two heat maps (image function). if that is not possible, is there a way to code an offset in an imagesc plot (i.e. rows separated from each other)?

thanks
Doug replied on May 20th, 2010 at 13:03 UTC :

@Fabian

Do you mean there would an axis within an axis, sort of like picture in picture on a television?

When you do subplot, each can be of a different size:
```
subplot(2,1,1);
subplot(2,2,3);
subplot(2,2,4);
```
If you use subplot and they overlay each other, as a feature the old one will be deleted. The axis command with position property does not though.