User`s guide

R2008a
18-30
Data Analysis
Data Brushing for Graphs and Linked Variables
• “Data Brushing Tool” on page 18-31
• “Data Brushing API” on page 18-32
• “Data Linking Tool” on page 18-32
• “Data Linking API” on page 18-34
This release introduces two new interactive tools for data exploration:
• Data brushing — For marking observations on graphs, allowing you to remove or
save them to new variables
• Data linking — For connecting graphs with data sources (workspace variables) to
automatically and interactively update them
In addition, figure windows have a new banner, called the linking and brushing message
bar. By default, when you plot data into a figure (i.e., add axes), an informational banner
appears across top of the figure that looks like this.
In the figure's message bar, click the first two links to read about these new tools. Click
the Play video link to open a nine-minute video tutorial about the tools in a browser
window (the video also describes new GUI-building features.) To dismiss the banner,
click the X. Once you do, the banner only reappears on subsequent plots if you select
Show linking and brushing message bar in the MATLAB Preferences Confirmation
Dialogs panel.
Note: The linking and brushing message bar can obscure a plot's title. Also, if you do not
dismiss the message bar, it is visible in images of figures captured with getframe, but it
does not print. See ??? for details.
Use data brushing when you want to isolate observations in a 2-D or 3-D graph for
separate analysis, or to remove outliers or noisy data points. Data brushing can be