How to display small values in boxplot

Hello! I have temperature and precipitation data values from years 1931-2020. I am looking at precipitation values each 30 years. I want to create a boxplot with precipitation values, but the numbers are very small (starting on 0 up to 0.8300 inches) and do not show up in my boxplot.

I tried to edit the Y-axis to make values smaller than 0, but it doesn't work. Attached is a picture of how the boxplot comes up and the code I used.

Thank you!

 hold on
 
 xPR = [DailyPR_1; DailyPR_2; DailyPR_3];
gP1 = repmat({'1931-1960'},10321,1);
gP2 = repmat({'1961-1990'},11243,1);
gP3 = repmat({'1991-2020'},10792,1);
gPR = [gP1; gP2; gP3];
boxplot(xPR,gPR)
title('Daily Precipitation (in)')
xlabel('Years')
ylabel('Precipitation (in)')

[Kishan Dhakan]

Can you try creating an Axes programatically (using uiaxes() function) and setting the axes property YLim or YTicks manually?

Answer 1

[Jonas]

for this case a logarithmic scale would be nice. the only problem is that you have 0 values which woul map to -inf. you could set the 0 values to a positive value that is smaller than all other values, this way the median line would stay at the same place. but i would set the ylim lower border to the snallest nonzero element before elemination of the zeros

data= [0 0.1 0.5 1; 2 7 0 3];
smallestNonZero=min(data(data>0),[],'all');
data(data==0)=0.1*smallestNonZero;
boxplot(data);
set(gca,'YScale','log'); 

ylim([smallestNonZero, max(data(:))]);

another approach without changing values would be generate a plot with a loharithmic and a linear part along the yaxis. i saw a fileexchange submission for that purpose lately, i will add it here if i find it again

edit:

so using some more code, but a nicer result. basically two subplot sticked together

data=[0.1 0.01 0.5 0.8 1 2 3 4 4 400 20 0 5 2 1.4 0 0.8 0.6 0.3 0 0.4 0.1 0.0246 1.2 1.02 0 0 0 0 0 0.01 0.03;
    0.1 0.01 0.5 0.8 1 2 3 4 4 400 20 0 5 2 104 0 8 0.6 3 0 0.04 0.1 0.0246 1.2 1.02 0 0 0 0 0 0.01 0.3].';

% this will be the lower part of the plot, we move the position manually
% later
ax1 = subplot(211);

breakpoint=min(data(data>0),[],'all');
upperPlotData=data;
upperPlotData(upperPlotData<breakpoint)=0.1*breakpoint;
boxplot(upperPlotData);

% this will be the upper part of the plot, we move the position manually
% later
ax2 = subplot(212);
boxplot(data);

set(ax1,'units','normalized','position',[0.15 0.1 0.8 0.4]);
set(ax1,'yscale','lin','ylim',[-0.01 breakpoint],'xticklabel','');

set(ax2,'units','normalized','position',[ax1.Position(1) sum(ax1.Position(2:2:end)) ax1.Position(3:4)]);
set(ax2,'yscale','log','ylim',ylim().*[0 1]+[breakpoint 0],'xticklabel','');


ax1.XLabel.String='xlabel';
ax1.YLabel.String='ylabel';
ax1.YLabel.Units='normalized';
ax1.YLabel.Position(2)=ax1.YLabel.Position(2)+sum(ax1.Position(2:2:4));
ax2.Title.String='title';

set(ax1,'xticklabel',ax1.XTick);
set(ax2,'xticklabel','');
linkaxes([ax1 ax2],'x');

% delete one of the ticks to avoid overlap
ax2.YTick(1)=[];

leading to this: