Problems in Plotting Line Plots with Overlapping Segments

I am trying to draw Probability of Handover Failure vs. Velocity of Mobile Terminal. The issue is that i am getting two overlapping Line Plots on Probability (0.02) along Y axis. Actually, one Line Plot is exactly on 0.02, while the other is just above 0.02, but they appear quite identical.

Can anyone guide me that how to make the difference among the two visible?

Check this eclipse area

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Try

plot(x,y, 'y-', 'LineWidth', 5); % Really wide solid yellow line underneath
hold on;
plot(x, y2, 'b--', 'LineWidth', 2); % Narrower, dashed blue line on top.

[Joseph Cheng]

Would it also be acceptable to use markers to distinguish between overlapping lines?

[Adnan]

Yes, it is acceptable.

[Adnan]

Image Analyst, here is the revised form. Actually, i am more interested to see that this yellow plot lies exactly at what value of Y axis. Like the black dotted line would be at 0.02. So, the yellow would be around what?

Is it related to scaling?

[Image Analyst]

Yes it's related to scaling. Get rid of the blue and green lines and you should be better able to distinguish between the lines that are around 0.02.

Answer 2

[Star Strider]

There are several options. For instance, having one dashed and the other solid (or other variations) is easy using the LineSpec property of plot.

[Star Strider]

If the plots almost completely overlap, it may be very difficult to distinguish them on the same line plot. I can think of two possibilities to get around this problem:

1. Use subplot to plot each in a separate plot in the same figure;
2. Use the ribbon to plot them together in 3D. You can rotate the plot interactively, and programmatically with the view function, and vary the widths fo the ribbons to get the result you want.

There are probably other possibilities, but those may involve offsets, second y-axes, or other things that would make the plots difficult to interpret.

EDIT — With respect to your ellipse area plot, I would definitely suggest you use subplot.

[Adnan]

Thanks Star Rider. I have tried these Line Spec approaches, but they really seemed to be jumbled up. Any specific approach for scaling wherein this could be resolved?

Star Strider, how to use the subplot command?

[Star Strider]

I’m a bit lost. Unless the yellow and dotted blue lines are supposed to be constant, the subplot approach would be:

figure(1)
subplot(2,1,1)
plot(x1,y1, '-b', x2,y2, '-g')
grid
subplot(2,1,2)
plot(x3,y3, '-y', x4,y4, '--b')
grid

This would plot two subplots, one above the other. It looks as though they all share approximately the same x-values, so the x-axis scales in both plots would be the same, but the y-axis scales would be appropriately different.

I don’t know your variable names, so the top subplot would, for example, plot the two variables currently plotted in blue and green, going from zero to about 0.12 and 0.15. The second subplot would plot the variables currently plotted in a thick yellow line and a dotted blue line, in the figure you posted at a y-value of about 0.02. If they are not constant at that value, the y-scale in the lower subplot will reflect their ranges. They would both be plotted in the same figure window, but not in the same plot.