Automatically plot different colored lines

Question

I m trying to plot several kernel density estimations on the same graph  and I want them to all be different colors  I have a kludged solution using a string  rgbcmyk  and stepping through it for each separate plot  but I start having duplicates after 7 iterations  Is there an easier more efficient way to do this  and with more color options   for n 1 10  source n  data normrnd rand   100 abs rand   50  100 1    generate random data end cstring  rgbcmyk     color string figure hold on for n 1 length source    f x  ksdensity source n  data     calculate the distribution  plot x f cstring mod n 7  1      plot with a different color each time end

User · Answer

If all vectors have equal size  create a matrix and plot it  Each column is plotted with a  different color automatically Then you can use legend to indicate columns   data   randn 100  5    figure  plot data    legend cellstr num2str  1 size data 2         Or  if you have a cell with kernels names  use  legend names

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Actually  a decent shortcut method for getting the colors to cycle is to use hold all  in place of hold on    Each successive plot will rotate  automatically for you  through MATLAB s default colormap   From the MATLAB site on hold      hold all holds the plot and the current line color and line style so that subsequent plotting commands do not reset the ColorOrder and LineStyleOrder property values to the beginning of the list  Plotting commands continue cycling through the predefined colors and linestyles from where the last plot stopped in the list

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You could use a colormap such as HSV to generate a set of colors  For example   cc hsv 12   figure   hold on  for i 1 12     plot  0 1   0 i   color  cc i      end   MATLAB has 13 different named colormaps   doc colormap  lists them all     Another option for plotting lines in different colors is to use the LineStyleOrder property  see Defining the Color of Lines for Plotting in the MATLAB documentation for more information

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Late to the party  I was looking into this myself and just found about this axes option called ColorOrder you can specify the colour order for the session or just for the figure and then just plot an array and let MATLAB automatically cycle through the colours specified   see Changing the Default ColorOrder  example  set 0  DefaultAxesColorOrder  jet 5   A rand 10 5   plot A

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Late answer  but two things to add    For information on how to change the  ColorOrder  property and how to set a global default with  DefaultAxesColorOrder   see the  Appendix  at the bottom of this post  There is a great tool on the MATLAB Central File Exchange to generate any number of visually distinct colors  if you have the Image Processing Toolbox to use it   Read on for details      The ColorOrder axes property allows MATLAB to automatically cycle through a list of colors when using hold on all  again  see Appendix below for how to set get the ColorOrder for a specific axis or globally via DefaultAxesColorOrder   However  by default MATLAB only specifies a short list of colors  just 7 as of R2013b  to cycle through  and on the other hand it can be problematic to find a good set of colors for more data series  For 10 plots  you obviously cannot rely on the default ColorOrder   A great way to define N visually distinct colors is with the  Generate Maximally Perceptually-Distinct Colors   GMPDC  submission on the MATLAB Central File File Exchange   It is best described in the author s own words      This function generates a set of colors which are distinguishable by reference to the  Lab  color space  which more closely matches human color perception than RGB  Given an initial large list of possible colors  it iteratively chooses the entry in the list that is farthest  in Lab space  from all previously-chosen entries    For example  when 25 colors are requested     The GMPDC submission was chosen on MathWorks  official blog as Pick of the Week in 2010 in part because of the ability to request an arbitrary number of colors  in contrast to MATLAB s built in 7 default colors    They even made the excellent suggestion to set MATLAB s ColorOrder on startup to   distinguishable colors 20    Of course  you can set the ColorOrder for a single axis or simply generate a list of colors to use in any way you like   For example  to generate 10  maximally perceptually-distinct colors  and use them for 10 plots on the same axis  but not using ColorOrder  thus requiring a loop      Starting with X of size N-by-P-by-2  where P is number of plots mpdc10   distinguishable colors 10    10x3 color list hold on for ii 1 size X 2       plot X   ii 1  X   ii 2       Color  mpdc10 ii      end   The process is simplified  requiring no for loop  with the ColorOrder axis property      X of size N-by-P-by-2 mpdc10   distinguishable colors 10  ha   axes  hold ha  on   set ha  ColorOrder  mpdc10       --- set ColorOrder HERE --- plot X     1  X     2   -        loop NOT needed   Color  NOT needed  Yay    APPENDIX  To get the ColorOrder RGB array used for the current axis   get gca  ColorOrder     To get the default ColorOrder for new axes   get 0  DefaultAxesColorOrder     Example of setting new global ColorOrder with 10 colors on MATLAB start  in startup m   set 0  DefaultAxesColorOrder  distinguishable colors 10

[matlab] Automatically plot different colored lines

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