How to rearrange categoricals to a specified sequence

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Hi all,
I am a Earth and Environmental Science student trying to do his group project and failing miserably.
I am trying to plot the frequency of the number of storms per month for a year.
I used tabulate to get the total number of storms oer month and then plot them using bar.
However, the months that are tabulated are in a disorganised arrangement and i would like to plot them following the correct monthly order.
I have tried listing them out as per the matlab instructions however, it keeps returning me that it is not a permutation of the categorical.
the categorical gives me a 12x1 categorical and the names of the months are spelled correctly
I have also tried using the function perms to calculate all possible permutations of the 12 months, however , matlab does not let me as it is too big of an output (42.8GB)
Pls send help :)
2019-11-08 (1).png
untitled.png

Answers (1)

Campion Loong
Campion Loong on 15 Nov 2019
The categories of your categorical array is sorted in alphabetical order.
% 'c' is your categorical array
>> categories(c)
ans =
12×1 cell array
{'April' }
{'August' }
{'December' }
{'February' }
{'January' }
{'July' }
{'June' }
{'March' }
{'May' }
{'November' }
{'October' }
{'September'}
Note that order of the categories is independent of the order of elements in the array itself:
>> c
ans =
12×1 categorical array
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
In this state, when you call bar with the categorical array and a numeric vector (i.e. your monthly rainfall), the visualization looks out of order:
% A naive example of 1:12
>> bar(c, 1:12)
untitled1.png
To get the bars in desired order, reorder the categorical array's categories before calling bar:
>> months_in_order = ["January" "February" "March" "April" "May" "June" "July" "August" "September" "October" "November" "December"];
>> c = reordercats(c, months_in_order);
>> bar(c, 1:12);
untitled1.png

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