Bar Chart Race Plot

Copyright (c) 2020 Michio Inoue

This repository provides a function that generates a bar chart race plot.

Requirements: R2019b

Syntax

barChartRace(X) draws the animation of the bar chart for each rows of X. X can be numeric array, table, or timetable.

h1 = barChartRace(X) returns a handle (h1) to the figure with bar chart.

[h1,h2] = barChartRace(X) returns a handle (h2) to the figure with the data description in addition to h1.

[ __ ] = barChartRace(X, Name, Value) to use some Name-Value Pair Arguments.

Name-Value Pair Arguments

'Time': A vector (numeric or datetime) that represents the time for each raw of X. The default is 1:size(inputs,1)

'LabelNames': A cell or string vector of the variable names, each element corresponds to each columns of X. The default is "name" + string(1:size(X,2)) if X is a numeric array or the name of varialbes if X is a table or timetable.

'ColorGroups': A cell or string vector of color group name. Each element corresponds to each columns of X. The default is "name" + string(1:size(X,2)) if X is a numeric array or the name of varialbes if X is a table or timetable. Example: With 'ColorGroups' = ['g1','g1','g2','g1','g2'], the bars of 1st, 2nd, 4th column of inputs will the same color. The default color order will be used.

'NumDisplay': A number of variable to display from the top. The default is all, size(X,2).

'NumInterp': A number of datapoints to be generated between each time stamp of X. The larger the value is the smoother/slower the transtion. The default is 2.

'Method': A method for above interpolation. The default is 'linear', but can be 'spline' for more dynamic bar transition.

'GenerateGIF': If TRUE, GIF animation of bar chart race will be generated.

'Outputfilename': Output GIF file name

'XlabelName': The XLabelName, the defaultis "" (emtpy)

'IsInteger': If TRUE, the text shown next to each bar will be arounded to interger value. The default is TRUE.

'FontSize': Axes fontsize, the default is 15.

'DisplayFontSize': The fontsize of the time stamp display, the default is 15.

'YTickLabelRotation': The angle of the y-axes label text, the default is 0.

'Position': Location and size of the drawable area, specified as a vector of the form [left bottom width height]. The deafult is 'DefaultFigurePosition'

'GIFDelayTime': Delay before displaying next image. Delay before displaying next image, in seconds, a scalar value in the range [0,655]. The default here is 0.05 (see imwrite for details)

'Footnote': String text to display at the bottom right corner of the axes. For multiple lines of text, use a vector of strings. Default is "visualized by MATLAB"

Example

See barChartRace.m for the detail options.

Here's a toy data set and its transition of rankings. The variable A starts from 5th place and move to 1st place in the end.

addpath("function");

% Some toy (time series) data set
maxT = 45;
time = 0:50;
x0 = 1:5; % initial data
rate = (5:-1:1)/100*2; % growth rate
data = zeros(length(time),length(x0));
data(1,:) = x0;
for ii=2:length(time)
    data(ii,:) = data(ii-1,:).*(1+rate);
end
[h1, h2] = barChartRace(data);

% The gif at the top will be generated by the following setting
names = ["A","B","C","D","E"];
barChartRace(data,"IsInteger",false,"LabelNames",names,"GenerateGIF",true);

Scripts

There are also some sample scripts which will generate a bar chart race plot. These can be a good example to work through the basic ideas behind the bar chart race animation with graphics object of MATLAB. These script can work with the earlier version of MATLAB.

• barChartRace_UniColor.m: Single color version
• barChartRace_multiColor_oneBar.m: Multi-color version with one bar object.
• barChartRace_multiColor_multiBar.m: Multi0color version with multi-bar objects (for users with R2017a or earlier.)

Note: The implementation of a function barChartRace is similar to that of barChartRace_multiColor_oneBar.m but many additional options.