I am plotting Cumulative Distribution Functions, with a large number of data points. I am plotting a few lines on the same plot, which are identified with markers as it will be printed in black and white. What I would like are markers evenly spaced in the x-dimension. What I am getting is one marker per data point (and given the number of points, they all overlap)
I'm not sure if it's my understanding of how to plot well, or just a lack of understanding matplotlib. I can't find a 'marker frequency' setting.
An easy solution for one line would be to take every N'th value from the line, and use that as a separate line with linestyle='', but I would like the markers to be vertically aligned, and the different x arrays have different lengths.
# in reality, many thousands of values
x_example = [ 567, 460, 66, 1034, 275, 26, 628, 99, 287, 157, 705, 421, 1093, \
139, 204, 14, 240, 179, 94, 139, 645, 670, 47, 520, 891, 450, 56, 964, \
1728, 99, 277, 356, 1628, 745, 364, 88, 112, 810, 816, 523, 401, 89, \
278, 917, 370, 53, 39, 90, 853, 356 ]
x = sort(x_example)
y = linspace(0,1,len(x))
ax = subplot(1,1,1)
plots[w] = ax.plot(x,y, marker='o')
You can do plot(x,y,marker='o',markevery=5) to mark every fifth point, but I don't think there is any built-in support for setting marks at even intervals. You could decide on the x locations where you want the marks, use e.g. numpy.searchsorted to find which data points the locations fall between, and then interpolate between the neighboring points to find the y coordinates.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2040306/plot-with-fewer-markers-than-data-points-or-a-better-way-to-plot-cdfs-matplo