Backward stairs plot in MATLAB

Hello community,

I have a question about the function "stairs" for plotting in 2D.

When using this function, normally, the horizontal lines (stairs) will break away to the right side of the data points (shown in the red plot), like a zero-order-hold function.

However, I have a situation where the horizontal lines must be on the left side instead (see the blue plot, which I simply made in Paint).

I think many applications might need this kind of backward plot, e.g. when data is obtained after a long measurement window, and the timestamps (plotted on x-axis) are made at the time when the measurement value is available. Each data point represents the value in the past, not the future. Therefore, a normal stairs plot will not be the most appropriate visualisation for this application.

Theoretically, I could also minus the time-axis by 1 sample period, but I wonder if this can be done smartly using a property of the stairs function itself, so I can keep the timestamps unmodified.

Thanks

Answer 1

[Voss]

x = 1:8;
y = [3 1 4 3 7 3 4 2];

stairs(flip(x),flip(y),'-b')
hold on
stairs(x,y,'--r')

legend('Backward','Normal')

ylim([0 8])

[Tawichai Premgamone]

Brilliant!!

Thanks a lot Voss.

[Voss]

You're welcome!