Plot circles with alpha values in MATLAB

Question

I\'m creating a scatter plot of some data, as you do, and I have a number of repeated data points which I\'d like to plot as circles with some alpha value so that piling on

Answer 1

I tried to do a general function using patch. It's slow and a bit buggy, but it works OK for simple cases. MATLAB needs a real-line alpha though.

x and y are points to plot, w the width of the line, col the color and a the alpha value.

Example:

x = linspace(-2,2,100);
plotWithAlpha(x,sin(4*x),0.04,'r',0.2)


function [] = plotWithAlpha(x,y,w,col,a)
%function [] = plotWithAlpha(x,y,w,col,a)
    if(size(x,1) ~= 1)
       x = x.';
    end

    if(size(x,1) ~= 1)
       y = y.';
    end

    sz = length(x);

    % Calculate derrivatives of the curve
    X = csaps(1:sz(1),x,1);
    Y = csaps(1:sz(1),y,1);

    mx = fnval(fnder(X,1),1:sz(1)).';
    my = fnval(fnder(Y,1),1:sz(1)).';

    T = [mx my]; %tangent

    % Normalize tangents
    T = bsxfun(@rdivide,T,sqrt(sum(T.^2,2)));

    N = zeros(size(T));

    N(:,2) = 1;
    N(:,1) = -T(:,2)./T(:,1);

    N = bsxfun(@rdivide,N,sqrt(sum(N.^2,2)));

    N = N.';

    hold on

    for i = 2:length(x)
        X = [x(i-1)+w*N(1,i-1) x(i)+w*N(1,i) x(i-1)-w*N(1,i-1) x(i)-w*N(1,i)];
        Y = [y(i-1)+w*N(2,i-1) y(i)+w*N(2,i) y(i-1)-w*N(2,i-1) y(i)-w*N(2,i)];

        % Order the points
        D = pdist([X' Y']);
        D = squareform(D); D(D==0) = Inf;

        inds = 1;
        D(:,1) = Inf;

        [val ind] = min(D(1,:));
        inds(2) = ind;
        D(:,ind) = Inf;

        [val ind] = min(D(ind,:));
        inds(3) = ind;
        D(:,ind) = Inf;

        inds(4) = setxor(inds,1:4);

        X = X(inds);
        Y = Y(inds);

        patch(X,Y,col,'edgeColor','none','FaceAlpha',a)
    end

    hold off