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Ways to Explore Graphical Data

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Introduction Types of Tools Customizing Data Exploration Tools

Introduction

After determining what type of graph best represents your data, you can further enhance the visual display of information using the tools discussed in this section. These tools enable you to explore data interactively, eliminating the need to set the plethora of graphics properties required to achieve the same results using MATLAB commands.

Once you have achieved the desired results, you can then generate the MATLAB code necessary to reproduce the graph you created interactively. See Example — Generating M-Code to Reproduce a Graph for more information.

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Types of Tools

See the following sections for information on specific tools.

• Data Cursor — Displaying Data Values Interactively

• Enlarging the View

• Panning — Shifting Your View of the Graph

• Rotate 3D — Interactive Rotation of 3-D Views

• Camera Toolbar — Interacting with 3-D Views

You can also explore graphs visually with data brushing and linking:

• Data brushing lets you "paint" observations on a graph to select them for special treatment, such as

  • Extracting them into new variables

  • Replacing them with constant or NaN values

  • Deleting them

• Data linking connects graphs with the workspace variables they display, updating graphs when variables change

Brushing and linking work together across plots. When multiple graphs or subplots display the same variables, linking the graphs and brushing any of them causes the same data to also highlight on other linked graphs. The highlighting also appears on the selected rows of data when the variables are opened in the Variable Editor. For details, see Marking Up Graphs with Data Brushing and Making Graphs Responsive with Data Linking in the Data Analysis documentation.

You can perform numerical data analysis directly on graphs with curve fitting and time series tools; see

• Regression Analysis

• Interactive Fitting

• Time Series Tools

These and other topics are covered in the Data Processing section of the Data Analysis documentation. You can also use the Curve Fitting Toolbox™cftool if you have installed that toolbox.

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Customizing Data Exploration Tools

Most of the data exploration tools place you in a mode in which mouse gestures and clicks control a figure's content. You can customize behavior to control what happens in a mode by setting up a mode object for that mode. You can find examples of how to do this in the reference pages for datacursormode, pan, zoom , and rotate3d. You can also customize the behavior of the mouse scroll wheel by writing a callback for the WindowScrollWheelFcn property of a figure, but your custom scroll wheel callback will be ignored while in an interactive mode.

Note   Do not change figure callbacks within an interactive mode. While a mode is active (when panning, zooming, etc.), you will receive a warning if you attempt to change any of the figure's callbacks and the operation will not succeed. The one exception to this rule is the figure WindowButtonMotionFcn callback, which can be changed from within a mode. Therefore, if you are creating a GUI that updates a figure's callbacks, the GUI should some keep track of which interactive mode is active, if any, before attempting to do this.

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Data Exploration Tools

Data Cursor — Displaying Data Values Interactively

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