How to plot the colormap of a 3D data set

1st var: age [31,32,33,34,35]

2nd var: years of working [10,15]

3rd var: corresponding yearly income(*10k) [8,8,6,9,9,10,14,17,13,9]

-----edits---->Each combination of age&years corresponds to an income. For example, 31-yr-old person with 10 yrs of working experience earns 80k, 31-yr-old person with 15 yrs of working experience also earns 80k, etc.<----edits-----

I would like to represent the numbers in the third column with a color scale (smaller=blue --> larger=yellow) looking like a 2D histogram except the third dimension doesn't represent number of occurrence.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

income_matrix = reshape(yearly_income, length(years_working), []);
imagesc(age,years_working,income_matrix)
xticks(age)
yticks(years_working)

It was not clear what order the data was in in yearly_matrix so you need to check the first line. Is your yearly income arranged so that all of the ages are used in order for each years working entry? Or is it arranged so that all of the years working are used in order for each age? The above code assumes it is the years working are grouped together.

[Matlab_Student]

Thanks for pointing it out. I realized I didn't explain it correctly. Please take a look at the edited part!

[Walter Roberson]

The code I posted here uses the data in the same order as your edit implies it should be in, so my code here should be the solution to what you asked.

[Matlab_Student]

Thanks Walter!

I tried your suggestion with the following code

clc
clear all

age = [31,32,33,34,50];
year = [10,15];
income = [8,8,6,9,9,10,14,17,13,9];
income_matrix = reshape(income, length(year), []);
imagesc(age,income,income_matrix);
xticks(age);
yticks(year);
colorbar;

and here is the result:

It is what I wanted but there appears to be two problems:

1. y-axis doesn't display the corresponding year

2. I changed the last age to 50 and now the previous ages are pushed all the way to the left. They don't sit right underneath the blocks.

Do you have any suggestions on fixing these?

[Walter Roberson]

I suspect the colorbar might be interfering with the y axis labels. Try

 set(gca, 'YAxisLocation', 'left')

If that does not work then try again without the colorbar and see whether the y axes ticks show up.

Getting the x axes to label properly is a going to be a bit of a nuisance if you need the data cursor to show the correct position information. If you do not care about data cursor then use

imagesc(income_matrix);
xticks(1:length(age));
yticks(1:length(year));
set(gca, 'xticklabel', age);
set(gca, 'yticklabel', year);

[Matlab_Student]

combing these two worked!!Thanks!