Importing countries and years data into MATLAB

I am new to the whole matlab environment so i was hoping someone is able to guide me along. The project i am doing is environment related, i have data of various countries as well as the energy consumption, forest area and carbon emission. They are labeled as (E1990, F1990, C1990).

I have the following code to sort them in various years making it easier to call them out when plotting various graphs. However i am thinking of sorting them by countries.

Energy = FullDataset(1:60,:);
D1990 = Energy(:, { 'Country' 'E1990' 'C1990' 'F1990' 'P1990'}); 
D1991 = Energy(:, { 'Country' 'E1991' 'C1991' 'F1991' 'P1991'});
D1992 = Energy(:, { 'Country' 'E1992' 'C1992' 'F1992' 'P1992'}); 
D1993 = Energy(:, { 'Country' 'E1993' 'C1993' 'F1993' 'P1993'});

Example: Plot (Australia E1990, Canada E1990) or Plot (Australia , Canada) // this is suppose to show data ranging from E1990 - E1997 for Australia against Canada.

Secondly, I am seeking recommendation for the type of graph i should be using. Given that my data set consist of Energy consumption, forest area, carbon emission, population, earth average temperature.

Would really appreciate any comments or help given.

Cheers

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Attach the data file. This can probably be done very easily with the new "table" data type.

% Example using patients demo table.
load patients
patients = table(Age,Gender,Height,Weight,Smoker,...
    'RowNames',LastName)
t = patients([2,4], [1, 3,4])
xData = t{1,:}
yData = t{2,:}
scatter(xData, yData);

Requires R2013b or later.

[Tze Tian]

Thank you very much. Guess i will just have to import the data separately to work. By the way just another 2 short question.

What does this command does ? xData = t{1,:}

And also what sort of graph do you recommend for my case. Should i be throwing all data set together to compare ? or should i plot a graph with multiple lines representing the different countries for each data ?

Sorry if it is confusing as i am quite indecisive as to what sort of comparison or visualization should i do for the best representation of environmental impact.

[Image Analyst]

Why do you have to import separately? Can't you just do

originalTable = readtable(yourDataFileName);

??? It imports the whole table in just one line. There are probably multiple ways to display this. Perhaps a set of colored bars in a chart might be the best way - depends on how you want to present it. Maybe have the year be the "X" axis and the value on the Y and at each year you have a set of 10 or however many countries. You can use bar() with a 2D array to plot it like that.