How do I add monthly labels to my time series plot?

I have data points between 1 and 9862, respresenting each day from 1990 to 2017. I have extracted the first 5 years of data and want to add monthly labels on the x-axis e.g. Oct1990 Nov1990 ..... Sep1995.

[dpb]

9862/365.25

ans = 27.0007

Is only 27 years, while the difference between 2017 and 1970 is 47 or a 46 year span.

Hence the times cannot be daily.

Easiest would be to define what the time data point really are and use a @doc:datetime vector for the independent variable and plot against it instead. Then you get date labels "for free", the format for which you can set as desired.

[Eloïse]

thanks i meant 1990, i'll try that

Answer 1

[dpb]

Ah! Typos are the bane of programming! :)

Then

t=datetime(1990,1,1):datetime(2016,12,31);     % datetime vector
is5=isbetween(t,t(1),t(1)+years(5));           % logical to get 5 years from beginning
plot(t(is5),randn(sum(is5),1))                 % use your dependent variable indexed, too, of course

There's not enough space to label monthly unless you compress the formatting string and/or rotate the labels, but you get time labels automagically with the datetime axis.