Can I place markers on only some of the points of my line plot?

I have a plot that has a lot of points, and I would like to visualize it with markers. Placing markers on all the points makes the plot too cluttered; instead of a line made of markers I just get a thick line.

How can I plot only every other marker, or every third marker, or something like that?

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

You can control the marker positions on a line plot using the 'MarkerIndices' property. With that, you can specify at which indices of the data points you want to display markers.

For example, let us create 1000 points ranging from 0 to 10, and create a sinusoidal function of increasing amplitude.

x = linspace(0,10,1000);
y = exp(x/10).*sin(4*x);

Now, let us plot the function with a solid line and add asterisk markers every tenth data points:

plot(x,y,'-*','MarkerIndices',1:10:length(y))

The result is the following:

You can find more information about creating a line plot with markers here:https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/creating_plots/create-line-plot-with-markers.html

[Oleg Komarov]

Highly appreciated if implemented.

Answer 2

[Nirajan R]

The feature has been added now. You can use MarkerIndices property to achieve this. More info here: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/creating_plots/create-line-plot-with-markers.html

[Steven Lord]

When you call plot, omitting part of the data can change the shape of the line that is drawn so to control which markers are plotted you need to use MarkerIndices.

When you call scatter, omitting part of the data does not impact the rest of the points. Therefore you can simply call scatter on only part of your data. If you switch between the two figures created by the example below, the only differences will be the titles and the five points which were omitted in the second figure.

x = rand(1, 25);
y = rand(1, 25);

figure
scatter(x, y)
axis([0 1 0 1])
title('All data')

figure
scatter(x(1:20), y(1:20))
axis([0 1 0 1])
title('Only first 20 points')