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Line Plots of Matrix Data

When you call the plot function with a single matrix argument


One line is plotted for each column of the matrix. The x-axis is labeled with the row index vector 1:m, where m is the number of rows in Y. For example,

Z = peaks;

returns a 49-by-49 matrix obtained by evaluating a function of two variables. Plotting this matrix


produces a graph with 49 lines.

In general, if plot is used with two arguments and if either X or Y has more than one row or column, then

  • If Y is a matrix, and x is a vector, plot(x,Y) successively plots the rows or columns of Y versus vector x, using different colors or line types for each. The row or column orientation varies depending on whether the number of elements in x matches the number of rows in Y or the number of columns. If Y is square, its columns are used.

  • If X is a matrix and y is a vector, plot(X,y) plots each row or column of X versus vector y. For example, plotting the peaks matrix versus the vector 1:length(peaks) rotates the previous plot.

    y = 1:length(peaks);

  • If X and Y are both matrices of the same size, plot(X,Y) plots the columns of X versus the columns of Y.

You can also use the plot function with multiple pairs of matrix arguments.


This statement graphs each X-Y pair, generating multiple lines. The different pairs can be of different dimensions.

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