How can I tell what Variable represents the X and Y axis in a MATLAB Plot?

I'm having some trouble identifying what variables represent the x and y axes in my MATLAB graph. I select both variables (Var1 is dates, such as 1/23/1996, and Var2 is times, such as 22:33:45), and make a plot (the qqplot under Statistics Tollbox Plots) and I get this:

Please help! Super confused!

-rain6304

[dpb]

It appears you plotted the time column as a function of the date column -- the 7.3...E5 values along the x-axis are Matlab datenums (doc datenum for details on them) while the y-axis looks like the fractional time of a datenum in all likelihood. Days in datenums are whole integers from a reference date while times are fractional days (base 24 hours).

Need to see the actual data as you have it and what you wish to try to plot to say exactly what it should be, but it makes no sense to use times as values of any sort in a quantile-quantile plot that I can think of.

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

OK, I’ll play along with the joke!

You’ve demonstrated that dates (x) and times (y) are not identically distributed.

[rain6304]

Why is it a joke?

[Star Strider]

I thought it was.

I don’t know why you would want to know how dates and times are distributed.

[dpb]

I think was/is just sorely confused on how to access the values he wants for plotting -- but then again, mayhaps it's confusion over what a q-q plot is; too little information to know just what was intended other than the obvious of time(hours of day) versus day doesn't make any sense...it is, until one does find datenum somewhat puzzling why a date plots on an axis of magnitude 7E5, though, I'll grant that.

[rain6304]

Thank you!