plot spread points (beeswarm plot)

Version 1.2.0.0 (12.8 KB) by Jonas
plotSpread plots distributions of data points, adding jitter to the points to avoid overlap.
12.3K Downloads
Updated 11 Feb 2017

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Editor's Note: This file was selected as MATLAB Central Pick of the Week

plotSpread allows creating "beeswarm plots", i.e. point distributions where jitter has been added to the data points to avoid overlap.
It further allows specifying groups within the data to show the distribution of the groups inside a distribution.
plotSpread is most suited to visualizing distributions with small amounts of data points. If the points become too dense, it becomes difficult to appreciate the relative importance of modes of a distribution, in which case "distributionPlot" should be used.

plotSpread uses the excellent "distinguishable_colors" to choose default colors for different categories.

In addition, the .zip file contains "myErrorbar" (a modification of the built-in errorbar), "repeatEntries" for easy repetition of entries in a list, and "isEven" to test whether a number is even. For both "repeatEntries" and "isEven" there are better alternatives on the File Exchange.

Cite As

Jonas (2024). plot spread points (beeswarm plot) (https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/37105-plot-spread-points-beeswarm-plot), MATLAB Central File Exchange. Retrieved .

MATLAB Release Compatibility
Created with R2009b
Compatible with any release
Platform Compatibility
Windows macOS Linux

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Version Published Release Notes
1.2.0.0

Updated support for categoryLabels, fixed help

1.1.0.0

Replaced the call to ismatrix, which is a function that only appeared in MATLAB after R2009b

1.0.0.0