stem plot with bars that don't go through zero

I'm trying to achieve a plot that looks like this . The stem plot seems to be the one to use, with a Y input having two columns for the lower and upper bounds, however it seems the vertical lines always have to be connected to the horizontal (zero) line of the plot. any way to make them independent of that line, for instance go from 3 to 5 on the y axis? Thanks!

Answer 1

[José-Luis]

lower_lim = -2 * rand(1,15);
upper_lim = 2 * rand(1,15);
x_val = (1:15);

aH = axes;
hold on;
for ii = [lower_lim;upper_lim;x_val]
    plot(aH,[ii(3), ii(3)],[ii(1), ii(2)], 'b-');
end

mean_lim = (mean(lower_lim) + mean(upper_lim))/2;
plot(aH,aH.XLim,[mean_lim, mean_lim], 'r--');

Answer 2

[Steven Lord]

It sounds like either you want errorbars as created by the errorbar function or you want to change the baseline of your stem plot as per the last example on the stem documentation page.

Answer 3

[Thorsten]

You can use my function stem2 to do it:

X = linspace(0,2*pi,50)';
Y = [cos(X), 0.5*sin(X)];
h = stem2(X,Y);
set(h, 'Color', 'b', 'LineWidth', 2)

with stem2 given as

function h = stem2(x, y)
%STEM2 Stem plot with upper and lower bounds
%
%   H = STEM2(X, Y)
%
%   [e-mail]  2016-07-05
if nargin == 0 % demo
  X = linspace(0,2*pi,50)';
  Y = [cos(X), 0.5*sin(X)];
  h = stem2(X,Y);
  set(h, 'Color', 'b', 'LineWidth', 2)
  clear h
  return
end

if nargin == 1  
  y = x;
end

% check that y is a N*2 column vector
if size(y,2) ~= 2, 
  y = y';
  if size(y, 2) == 2
    warning('Y should be a Nx2 column vector.')
  else
    error('Y should be a Nx2 column vector.')
  end
end
N = size(y, 1);

% generate x if not given
if nargin == 1
  x = 1:N;
end

x = x(:); % force column vector

x = [x x nan(N,1)]';
y = [y nan(N,1)]';

h = plot(x(:), y(:));

if nargout == 0
  clear h
end