Visualizations with Vector Data

You've already seen line plots, bar graphs, pie charts, and histograms created in MATLAB. In this reading, you'll
see more of these as well as area, scatter, stem, and stair plots.

This Live Script generates visualizations of the operating costs and revenue generated throughout the day on
Monday and Saturday at the pizza shop ("revenue generated" is, here, just how much money the shop brought
in by selling pizzas). Using various kinds of visualizations reveals many different facts about the data, including
many interesting trends and patterns in the data.

Table of Contents
Loading the Data...................................................................................................................................................... 1
Pizza Data............................................................................................................................................................ 1
Operating Costs....................................................................................................................................................1
Visualizing Operating Costs......................................................................................................................................1
Plot........................................................................................................................................................................1
Histogram............................................................................................................................................................. 2
Visualizing Operating Costs and Revenue............................................................................................................... 3
Area...................................................................................................................................................................... 4
Scatter.................................................................................................................................................................. 5
Visualizing Profit....................................................................................................................................................... 6
Stem..................................................................................................................................................................... 6
Stairs.....................................................................................................................................................................6
Suggestions for Further Exploration with Visualizations...........................................................................................7

Loading the Data

Pizza Data
Use the load command to load pizzaData.mat.

load pizzaData.mat

Operating Costs
The hourly operating costs on Monday and Saturday were calculated by taking into account the work schedules
and pay rates of each pizza shop employee, utilities costs, rent costs, and the cost of ingredients used per hour.
The two 24 element vectors defined below, operatingCostMonday and operatingCostSaturday, contain
the operating costs (in dollars) from every hour of the day on Monday and Saturday.

% Define 24 element vector for Monday (dollars per hour)

operatingCostMonday = [8; 8; 8; 8; 8; 8; 8; 8; 8; 85; 100; 111; 166; 160; 162; 159;

% Define 24 element vector for Saturday (dollars per hour)

operatingCostSaturday = [8; 8; 8; 8; 8; 8; 8; 8; 8; 108; 141; 254; 334; 263; 302; 373

Visualizing Operating Costs

Plot

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The first line below creates a line plot with the values of operatingCostMonday on the y-axis and the
index of operatingCostMonday on the x-axis. The index starts at 1 and, since there are 24 elements in
operatingCostMonday, goes to 24.

plot(operatingCostMonday)
title('Monday: Operating Costs')
ylabel('Dollars per Hour')
xlabel('Index')

It is useful to see the operating costs from Monday and Saturday on the same figure. Accomplish this by using
hold on. Don't forget to use hold off after using hold on.

plot(operatingCostMonday)
hold on
plot(operatingCostSaturday)
hold off
legend('Monday','Saturday')
title('Operating Costs')
xlabel('Index')
ylabel('Dollars per Hour')

Histogram
The operating costs from Monday and Saturday were just compared by using the plot function. There are
many more visualization functions that help analyze data further. For example, with histogram, you can
visualize the distribution of the operating costs. Use histogram to visualize the distribution of operating costs
on Monday.

histogram(operatingCostMonday)
title('Monday: Operating Costs')
xlabel('Dollars per Hour')
ylabel('Number of Hours')

As with plot, two histograms can be placed on the same figure. Use histogram to visualize the operating
costs from Monday and Saturday on the same figure.

histogram(operatingCostMonday)
hold on
histogram(operatingCostSaturday)
hold off
legend('Monday','Saturday')
title('Operating Costs')
xlabel('Dollars per Hour')
ylabel('Number of Hours')

MATLAB makes the histogram on top transparent by default. This allows you to see both histograms.

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We recommend that you experiment with the bin size to find new, useful configurations. Splitting the data into
similarly sized bins, for example, helps to compare both distributions. To do this, specify the edges of the bins
and include this information when using the histogram function.

binEdges = [0 100 200 300 400];

histogram(operatingCostMonday,binEdges)
hold on
histogram(operatingCostSaturday,binEdges)
hold off
legend('Monday','Saturday')
title('Operating Costs')
xlabel('Dollars per Hour')
ylabel('Number of Hours')

On Monday, the operating cost was never more than $200 per hour. But on Saturday, there were three hours
with operating costs between $200 per hour and $300 per hour and six hours with operating costs between
$300 per hour and $400 per hour.

How would you make it so these histograms each have 8 bins that are 50 units wide rather than 4 bins that are
100 units wide? Copy the code from above, paste it below, and change it to produce histograms with 8 bins that
are 50 units wide.

Visualizing Operating Costs and Revenue

To understand how profitable the shop was throughout each of these days, the revenue generated every hour
needs to be calculated. For this Live Script, the revenue generated is assumed to be equivalent to the money
brought in by selling pizzas.

Thus, begin by selecting the relevant data from the pizzasCompleted vector.

% Select the data from Monday

pizzasCompletedMonday = pizzasCompleted(1:25)

% Select the data from Saturday

pizzasCompletedSaturday = pizzasCompleted(120:144)

Both of these vectors (pizzasCompletedMonday and pizzasCompletedSaturday) contain 25 elements.

Applying the diff function to these vectors results in two 24 element vectors because diff calculates the
difference between each element in the vector.

% Calculate the pizzas sold every hour on Monday

pizzasPerHourMonday = diff(pizzasCompletedMonday)

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 % Calculate the pizzas sold every hour on Saturday
pizzasPerHourSaturday = diff(pizzasCompletedSaturday)

Now you have two 24 element vectors that contain the pizzas sold every hour on Monday and Saturday. Since
the average price of a pizza is $15, you can estimate the hourly revenue (in dollars) by multiplying by 15.

% Calculate the money made every hour on Monday

revenueMonday = 15*pizzasPerHourMonday;

% Calculate the money made every hour on Saturday

revenueSaturday = 15*pizzasPerHourSaturday

These vectors (revenueMonday and revenueSaturday) are a good estimate of how much revenue was
generated throughout the day (that is, of how much money was brought in by selling pizzas) on Monday and
Saturday at the pizza shop. Both of these vectors are 24 elements long.

Area
Compare the operating cost and revenue generated throughout the day on Monday by using the area function,
which creates an area plot.

area(revenueMonday)
hold on
area(operatingCostMonday)
hold off
legend('Revenue Generated by Selling Pizzas', 'Operating Cost')
title('Monday: Revenue and Operating Cost')
xlabel('Index')
ylabel('Dollars per Hour')

The area plot clearly shows the hours when the revenue generated was larger than the operating cost. It
also provides a clear visualization of how the total revenue on Monday compares to the total operating cost
on Monday, since these totals are what is represented by the area of the blue and orange shaded areas,
respectively.

Next, use the area function again to compare the operating cost and revenue generated throughout the day on
Saturday.

area(revenueSaturday)
hold on
area(operatingCostSaturday)
hold off
legend('Revenue Generated by Selling Pizzas', 'Operating Cost')
title('Saturday: Revenue and Operating Cost')
xlabel('Index')
ylabel('Dollars per Hour')

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It looks like the revenue generated per hour on Saturday was, in general, much higher than the hourly operating
costs. Also, since the blue shaded area is much larger than the orange shaded area, the total revenue on
Saturday was much higher than the total operating cost on Saturday.

Scatter
The scatter function allows you to plot individual data points. This helps to make the relationship between
revenue and operating cost understandable.

scatter(operatingCostMonday, revenueMonday)
title('Monday: Operating Cost versus Revenue Generated')
xlabel('Operating Cost ($/h)')
ylabel('Revenue Generated ($/h)')

It is useful to plot the line y = x (which is, in this case, the line Operating Cost = Revenue Generated) on this
figure. Plot this line by using the plot function with the vector [0 200] for both the x-values and y-values.

xValues = [0 200];
yValues = [0 200];

scatter(operatingCostMonday, revenueMonday)
hold on
plot(xValues,yValues)
hold off
legend('Monday','y = x')
title('Monday: Operating Cost versus Revenue Generated')
xlabel('Operating Cost ($/h)')
ylabel('Revenue Generated ($/h)')

Any points above the line y = x represent hours when the revenue generated was higher than the operating
cost. In other words, points above the line represent profitable hours. Any points below this line represent hours
when the revenue generated was lower than the operating cost, meaning that the pizza shop lost money during
those hours.

Finally, create a figure that has two scatter plots for Monday and Saturday, as well as the line y = x. This time,
when creating the line y = x, use the vector [0 400] for both the x-values and y-values, since the data from
Saturday spans over a larger range of values.

xValues = [0 400];
yValues = [0 400];

scatter(operatingCostMonday, revenueMonday)
hold on
scatter(operatingCostSaturday, revenueSaturday)
plot(xValues, yValues)
hold off
legend('Monday','Saturday','y = x')

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 title('Operating Cost versus Revenue Generated')
xlabel('Operating Cost ($/h)')
ylabel('Revenue Generated ($/h)')

Notice all the points from Saturday that are above the line. It looks like Saturday was much more profitable than
Monday!

Visualizing Profit
In this final section, you'll compare how profitable the shop was on Monday with how profitable the shop was on
Saturday.

First, calculate the profit for each hour throughout the day by subtracting operating costs from revenue
generated.

% Calculate the profit for every hour on Monday (in dollars)

profitMonday = revenueMonday - operatingCostMonday

% Calculate the profit for every hour on Saturday (in dollars)

profitSaturday = revenueSaturday - operatingCostSaturday

Stem
Now, create a stem plot to visualize the profitability of each hour on Monday.

stem(profitMonday)
title('Monday: Profits')
ylabel('Profit ($/h)')
xlabel('Index')

And make a similar plot on a separate figure to visualize the profitability of each hour on Saturday.

stem(profitSaturday)
title('Saturday: Profits')
ylabel('Profit ($/h)')
xlabel('Index')

You could have placed these two stem plots on the same figure, but graphing them separetely allows you to
study each trend separately, without getting overwhelmed by information. Comparing these two stem plots, you
can see that Saturday was much more profitable.

Stairs
You could have used stair plots instead of stem plots to represent this data. Copy the code that created each of
the stem plots above and replace stem with stairs to see the same data represented by stair plots.

Use stairs to represent the profit throughout the day on Monday.

6
Use stairs to represent the profit throughout the day on Saturday.

Suggestions for Further Exploration with Visualizations

In this reading, you encountered the functions plot, histogram, scatter, area, stem, and stairs. You
should take the time to make some more visualizations using these functions.

For example, represent the profitability on Monday and Saturday using histogram. Create a figure below with
the profits from Monday represented by a histogram and the profits from Saturday represented by another
histogram on the same figure. If you need help getting started, copy the histogram code from before, paste it
below, and change it to graph the profits from Monday and Saturday.

Set the bins on these histograms to [-200 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000]
before you explore with other bin edges.

Tip: Use the colon operator to quickly create the vector of bin edges: binEdges = -200:200:2000

If you didn't already, go back and use legend, title, xlabel, and ylabel to annotate your figure.

Feel free to explore and make your own visualizations.

See the documentation for more details on the plot types included here, and many others.

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