How to generate this shape in Matlab?

Question

In matlab, how to generate two clusters of random points like the following graph. Can you show me the scripts/code?

Answer 1

If you want to generate such data points, you will need to have their probability distribution to be able to generate the points.

For your point, I do not have the real distributions, so I can only give an approximation. From your figure I see that both lay approximately on a circle, with a random radius and a limited span for the angle. I assume those angles and radii are uniformly distributed over certain ranges, which seems like a pretty good starting point.

Therefore it also makes sense to generate the random data in polar coordinates (i.e. angle and radius) instead of the cartesian ones (i.e. horizontal and vertical), and transform them to allow plotting.

C1 = [0 0];   % center of the circle
C2 = [-5 7.5];
R1 = [8 10];  % range of radii
R2 = [8 10];
A1 = [1 3]*pi/2; % [rad] range of allowed angles
A2 = [-1 1]*pi/2;

nPoints = 500;

urand = @(nPoints,limits)(limits(1) + rand(nPoints,1)*diff(limits));
randomCircle = @(n,r,a)(pol2cart(urand(n,a),urand(n,r)));

[P1x,P1y] = randomCircle(nPoints,R1,A1);
P1x = P1x + C1(1);
P1y = P1y + C1(2);

[P2x,P2y] = randomCircle(nPoints,R2,A2);
P2x = P2x + C2(1);
P2y = P2y + C2(2);

figure
plot(P1x,P1y,'or'); hold on;
plot(P2x,P2y,'sb'); hold on;
axis square

This yields:

This method works relatively well when you deal with distributions that you can transform easily and when you can easily describe the possible locations of the points. If you cannot, there are other methods such as the inverse transforming sampling method which offer algorithms to generate the data instead of manual variable transformations as I did here.