Arsthbt

I have found some software that allows me to "data mine" the values from publication figures. I have a bunch of contours from papers that I've mined using this software, and am having some trouble plotting the points with the Joined command.

Unfortunately, the downloaded points are sorted by increasing x values, which makes the plotting of Gaussian-esque contours very difficult. I've searched around the forums and haven't found anyone mentioning this problem.

Here's an example on a very small, simpler distribution (note my other sets are much larger so brute force definitely won't work.)

data=62.0774, 0.598737, 62.2377, 0.619119, 62.4048, 
0.580509, 62.5466, 0.637818, 62.9276, 0.654518, 62.9668, 
 0.566973, 63.3095, 0.671261, 63.8137, 0.688518, 63.8913, 
 0.565805, 64.4067, 0.703821, 64.8157, 0.568541, 65.1005, 
 0.718671, 65.7401, 0.573603, 65.9282, 0.732056, 66.6646, 
 0.580678, 66.7973, 0.743456, 67.6058, 0.589303, 67.7571, 
 0.755602, 68.5512, 0.599853, 68.6815, 0.761419, 69.4, 
 0.614478, 69.6059, 0.76384, 70.1679, 0.631668, 70.5117, 
 0.759937, 70.5514, 0.759266, 70.7216, 0.649606, 71.3609, 
 0.666955, 71.3764, 0.751005, 71.7909, 0.736308, 71.8078, 
 0.687055, 71.947, 0.702022, 72.0491, 0.717738

ListPlot[data]

gives me this:

While

ListLinePlot[data]

of course gives me this, because the points are ordered with increasing x-value:

So, is there any way to either join the points by nearest neighbor, or re-order the list such that the joined command will give me a neat line? This seems like a traveling-salesman type problem, which could quickly get slow as I increase the number of points too much.

You can use FindCurvePath to reorder your data. However, FindCurvePath expects the scale of the two coordinates to be close, so you need to rescale first:

new = FindCurvePath[data . 1, 0, 0, 100];
ListLinePlot[data[[#]]& /@ new]