Not sure what to do about error message "Conversion to double from cell is not possible." - matlab

Question

I'm writing a program that finds the indices of a matrix G where there is only a single 1 for either a column index or a row index and removes any found index if it has a 1 for both the column and row index. Then I want to take these indices and use them as indices in an array U, which is where the trouble comes. The indices do not seem to be stored as integers and I'm not sure what they are being stored as or why. I'm quite new to Matlab (but thats probably obvious) and so I don't really understand how types work for Matlab or how they're assigned. So I'm not sure why I',m getting the error message mentioned in the title and I'm not sure what to do about it. Any assistance you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
I forgot to mention this before but G is a matrix that only contains 1s or 0s and U is an array of strings (i think what would be called a cell?)
function A = ISClinks(U, G)
B = [];
[rownum,colnum] = size(G);
j = 1;
for i=1:colnum
s = sum(G(:,i));
if s == 1
B(j,:) = i;
j = j + 1;
end
end
for i=1:rownum
s = sum(G(i,:));
if s == 1
if ismember(i, B)
B(B == i) = [];
else
B(j,:) = i;
j = j+1;
end
end
end
A = [];
for i=1:size(B,1)
s = B(i,:);
A(i,:) = U(s,:);
end
end
This is the problem code, but I'm not sure what's wrong with it.
A = [];
for i=1:size(B,1)
s = B(i,:);
A(i,:) = U(s,:);
end

Answer 1

Your program seems to be structured as though it had been written in a language like C. In MATLAB, you can usually substitute specialized functions (e.g. any() ) for low-level loops in many cases. Your function could be written more efficiently as:
function A = ISClinks(U, G)
% Find columns and rows that are set in the input
active_columns=any(G,1);
active_rows=any(G,2).';
% (Optional) Prevent columns and rows with same index from being simultaneously set
%exclusive_active_columns = active_columns & ~active_rows; %not needed; this line is only for illustrative purposes
%exclusive_active_rows = active_rows & ~active_columns; %same as above
% Merge column state vector and row state vector by XORing them
active_indices=xor(active_columns,active_rows);
% Select appropriate rows of matrix U
A=U(active_indices,:);
end
This function does not cause errors with the example input matrices I tested. If U is a cell array (e.g. U={'Lorem','ipsum'; 'dolor','sit'; 'amet','consectetur'}), then return value A will also be a cell array.