Question

I have a seemingly simple problem, but an easy solution is alluding me. I have a very large series (tens or hundreds of thousands of points), and I just need to visualize it at different zoom levels, but generally zoomed well out. Basically, I want to plot it in a tool like Matlab or Pyplot, but knowing that each pixel can’t represent the potentially many hundreds of points that map to it, I’d like to see both the min and the max of all the array entries that map to a pixel, so that I can generally understand what’s going on. Is there a simple way of doing this?

Answer 1

I realized that simple plot() in MATLAB actually gives me more or less what I want. When zoomed out, it renders all of the datapoints that map to a pixel column as vertical line segments from the minimum to the maximum within the set, so as not to obscure the function’s actual behavior. I used area() to increase the contrast.