How to Rearrange Circular Data Sequentially

My data plots as follows:

The data jumps from bottom end to top end, back and forth, creating jagged lines in the line-plot.

What I want to happen (I created a mock-up) is:

Where the each successive data point in the closest distance-wise to the previous point. I assume I would have to loop through all points and check which is the closest in euclidean space and go to the next point.

I'm a beginner with MATLAB and I'm having trouble implementing this and any help is appreciated.

My data is attached to the post.

Answer 1

[the cyclist]

One possibility would be to calculate the convex hull using the convhull command, and plot that along with the X,Y points.

[Brian Vu]

Thanks for all your replies. This method more or less solved this problem. Do you happen to know how to spline this points together without creating a closed shape? I was attempting vector valued splines and only recently when I rearranged the data did I see that it attempts to close the shape (links all points together).

EDIT: I know my question is VERY vague but what I have is :

and I do not want the spline to fully close - I want it to spline bit by bit and then simply end without "looping" back on itself.

Answer 2

[the cyclist]

What command are you using to make the plot? It is defaulting to putting in a connecting line, but do you really need that at all? Maybe you could just use the X's, such as

plot(X,Y,'.')

or

scatter(X,Y)

Answer 3

[the cyclist]

You could calculate the four-quadrant inverse tangent of your X,Y coordinates, sort them in that order, and plot them as you did in your example.