Can anyone tell me what is the difference between scatter and plot commands in Matlab?

Hi I am new to matlab and going through basics. I am trying to plot points in Matlab HOwever, plot(1,2,3,4)

and

scatter([1,3],[2,4])

give me the same results. So what is the difference between plot and scatter command?

[vthuongt]

Is there any difference in speed and memory usage?

[Walter Roberson]

Yes.

http://blogs.mathworks.com/graphics/2015/06/09/object-creation-performance/

Answer 1

[Hugo]

scatter draws points without lines connecting them whereas plot may or may not plot the lines, depending on the arguments.

scatter returns a handle to an object called scattergroup whereas plot returns a handle to an object called lineseries. The scattergroup object has some properties (for example, for associating the size of the dots to a variable in the workspace) that are not present in the lineseries objects. Analogously, the lineseries has some properties (for exmaple, for controlling the type of lines) that are not present in the scattergroup object.

scatter allows you to specify a different colour and a different size for each point individually. It is not possible to do that with plot.

Hope this helps.

[Geethika]

Hi Hugo, Thanks for the reply. Can you give me a code in scatter which enables me to specify different color and size for each point individually? Thanks

[Hugo]

a=rand(100,3);
scatter(a(:,1),a(:,2),[40*ones(50,1);5*ones(50,1)],a(:,3))

That gives you random points in two different sizes and with random colours.