Re: [Gnuplot-info] pm3d with sparse data

[<HBB...@t-...>]

Lawrence Murray wrote:

> For interest sake, this is a plot of the results of a particle filter, a 
> sequential MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) sampling technique. On the x 
> axis is time, the y axis value, and the z axis the density of the 
> probability distribution. Simply put, I'm representing a two-dimensional 
> probability distribution as a 3d histogram.

But I'm afraid you didn't follow the first rule of histogram generation: 
think before you bin.  You appear to have binned way finer than your 
data supports.  As a rule of thumb histogram bins with zero entries 
should be the exception, not the rule.  Statistically the average count 
per bin should be at least roughly 5, because smaller counts are 
dominated by randomness.

Put another way: there's no way the display of your histogram can 
faithfully reproduce 256 MBytes' worth of data --- even a rather 
high-res screen image stores nowhere near that much information.  I.e. 
even if gnuplot managed to plot that file, the result would be 
completely useless.