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Editor's Note: This file was selected as MATLAB Central Pick of the Week
plotSpread allows creating "beeswarm plots", i.e. point distributions where jitter has been added to the data points to avoid overlap.
It further allows specifying groups within the data to show the distribution of the groups inside a distribution.
plotSpread is most suited to visualizing distributions with small amounts of data points. If the points become too dense, it becomes difficult to appreciate the relative importance of modes of a distribution, in which case "distributionPlot" should be used.
plotSpread uses the excellent "distinguishable_colors" to choose default colors for different categories.
In addition, the .zip file contains "myErrorbar" (a modification of the built-in errorbar), "repeatEntries" for easy repetition of entries in a list, and "isEven" to test whether a number is even. For both "repeatEntries" and "isEven" there are better alternatives on the File Exchange.
Cite As
Jonas (2026). plot spread points (beeswarm plot) (https://nl.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/37105-plot-spread-points-beeswarm-plot), MATLAB Central File Exchange. Retrieved .
Acknowledgements
Inspired by: Generate maximally perceptually-distinct colors
Inspired: Violin Plots for plotting multiple distributions (distributionPlot.m)
General Information
- Version 1.2.0.0 (12.8 KB)
MATLAB Release Compatibility
- Compatible with any release
Platform Compatibility
- Windows
- macOS
- Linux