Plotting the summation of a Heaviside function

How to plot the summation of a this Heaviside function, i.e : where are real positive parameters with and u as real variable.

[Toder]

Hi Gill, what have you tried so far? Is n fixed? It may be helpful to expand the summation on paper to better see what's going on. You can also plug in some sample points to get an idea of how the function behaves. Let's call the whole summation . Without even choosing values for we can figure out what S is for choices of μ. Three interesting ones to compute might be

,

Taking the time to figure these out will let us check the final plot once we make it. The documentation for the Heaviside function in Matlab can be found here.

[Gill Judie]

thank you for replying. As you said i already tried to compute this sum, but my main goal now is to expresse it as code and plot it in Matlab.

Answer 1

[Ameer Hamza]

Try this

mu = sort(rand(5,1)); % random vectors of 5 \mu values in ascending order
x = linspace(0,1,1000); % values on x-axis

y = sum(heaviside(x-mu)); % command to create vector of heaviside and summing them
plot(x, y)

[Gill Judie]

thank you for replying. i have tried to run this code on my Matlab but the following error message appeared

I'm if there is something wrong in my matlab?

[Ameer Hamza]

Can you tell which MATLAB version are you using?

[Ameer Hamza]

If you are using a version older than R2016b than try this code

mu = sort(rand(5,1)); % random vectors of 5 \mu values in ascending order
x = linspace(0,1,1000); % values on x-axis

X = bsxfun(@minus, x, mu);
y = sum(heaviside(X)); % command to create vector of heaviside and summing them
plot(x, y)

[Gill Judie]

It worked perfectly now thank you. By the way, I'm using the MATLAB R2011a version.

[Ameer Hamza]

I am glad to be of help.