Plotting histogram side by side in Matlab

Question

I have two vectors, c and d, whose histogram I need to plot side by side in the same figure in matlab. when i do hist(c); hold on; hist(d) the scale changes and I cant see the histogram of c vector. Where am i going wrong? Any help will be appreciated.

Answer 1

If you want the two to be in the same figure, you could try adjusting the X and Y limits to suit your needs (try help xlim and help ylim). However plotting them in the same figure might not always suit your needs, as a particular plot has to of course maintain a certain limit for X and Y.

If displaying them side by side in different figures would suffice however, you could consider using subplot():

>> A=[1 1 1 2 2];
>> B=[1 2 2 2 2];
>> figure(1);
>> hold on;
>> subplot(1,2,1);
>> hist(A);
>> subplot(1,2,2);
>> hist(B);

Resultant figure:

Notice how the different axis limits are maintained.

Answer 2

You can use axis([xmin xmax ymin ymax]) to control the x and y axis and select a range that will display both histograms. Depending on what you want your plot to look like, you may also want to try using nelements = hist(___) to get the number of elements in each bin and then plot them using bar(x,nelements) to control the location of each bar.