Stuart’s MATLAB Videos

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Flow chart shows which visualization to use

Nathan over at FlowingData.com had a post that explains what visualization to use in different situations. Ultimately he linked to this chart from Andrew Abela of The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method

Click for original version
The version displayed below was modified with permission of Andrew.

MATLAB flowchart
Looking at this, I wondered if I could make all of those visualizations in MATLAB. The answer was yes, with a little help from MATLAB Central.

Download this .zip and run main.m to see MATLAB create all those charts with simple data.

vWhist
Spider
WaterfallChart
Histo2D

are included in the zip for convenience.

Many of these visualizations had dedicated functions to do that exact plot, some required some data massaging (like the “100% stacked bar plots” that normalized each stacked bar series to have the same sum) and some required the addition of some lines (like the connected bar charts).

This was a fun exercise in reproducing all these plots in MATLAB. Do you have some favorite plots that are not shown here? Do you want to make some dedicated functions to create those various bar charts that needed the most fiddling with?

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