About Trendy

Trendy™ is a MATLAB based web service for tracking and plotting trends. With Trendy you can acquire data automatically, manipulate it in MATLAB, and plot it using MATLAB graphics code. Since all visitors to MATLAB Central can see all trends and plots, you can tap into the knowledge and experience of the MATLAB community by reusing and combining trends in new ways.

Getting Started with Trendy

You can do two things with Trendy:

Create a trend, which is a set of numbers collected daily from a single source
Visualize one or more trends in a picture called a plot

Creating Trends and Plots

You write a few lines of MATLAB code to collect data and another few lines of code to plot the trend. The most common way to collect data is to grab it from a web page using a technique called screen scraping. Trendy provides the urlfilter function to scrape one or more numbers off a web page and the updatetrend function to send your collected data back to Trendy for collection from MATLAB. Trend and plot code is run once a day.

Requirements

Community Profile

To practice using urlfilter, try some of the challenges in the tutorial.