Creating a polar histogram with x values (bins) that will appear on the graph even though no values fall into those bins?

I am trying to make a polar histogram of values that actually are measured angles of axons exiting a brain structure (they are all measured in 2D). Essentially, these angles are all roughly between 1-270 degrees, but there are no measurements between 270 & 360. I have attached a histogram made of the data. My goal is to essentially "wrap" this histogram around a circle, but since there are no values for the last 1/4 of the x values, I'm not sure how to tell MATLAB that "there needs to be an empty section on this histogram at the end."

Thank you!

Answer 1

[Steven Lord]

Do you need the histogram to be on a polar axes? If so use the polarhistogram function.

x = deg2rad(randi([0 270], 1, 1e6));
polarhistogram(x);

If not, just call histogram with a vector of bin edges and/or specifying the BinLimits name-value argument.

x = rand(1, 1e6);
h = histogram(x, 0:0.25:2);

h.BinEdges.'

ans = 9×1

0 0.2500 0.5000 0.7500 1.0000 1.2500 1.5000 1.7500 2.0000

Even though there's no data greater than 1, because I specified the bin edges that's what histogram used.

figure
h = histogram(x, 'NumBins', 16, 'BinLimits', [0 2]);

h.BinEdges.'

ans = 17×1

0 0.1250 0.2500 0.3750 0.5000 0.6250 0.7500 0.8750 1.0000 1.1250

16 equal width bins spanning from 0 to 2.

[James Baldassano]

Works perfectly, thank you!