Trying to create datetime index for monthly rainfall vector - matlab

I have a vector of data that is 564 elements long representing 1970/Jan rainfall, 1970/feb rainfall etc.
I want to index the vector using datetime.
I've tried to create a datetime array like this
years = linspace(1970,2015,47);
years = repelem(years,12)';
months = [1:12];
months = repmat(months,1,47)';
day = 1;
datetime = datetime(years,months,day)
But this gives me the error -
"Error using datetime (line 581)
Year, month, day, hour, and minute components must be integer values.
Error in Station_plots (line 32)
datetime = datetime(years,months,day)".
Am I going about solving this problem correctly?

Try 46 instead of 47. Simple Math

Related

How can I find the difference in hours between 2 times in character arrays?

I have 2 times stored in character arrays in MATLAB.
a = '11:00 PM'
b = '07:30 AM'
I want to find the difference in hours between the 2 times, which should be 8.5 hours in this example. Is there any short method to do that? I can datenum both numbers, subtract them, datevec the difference, extract the hours and minutes from the vector, and convert them into hours, but this takes a lot of lines. Is there a more efficient way of doing this or is there an existing function?
You can do this by converting each string using datetime, taking the difference, then converting the result with hours:
numHours = hours(diff(datetime({a; b}, 'InputFormat', 'hh:mm a')));
numHours = numHours + 24.*(numHours < 0)
numHours =
8.5000
The second line accounts for the condition in your example, where the second time has to occur on the next day for the time difference to be positive, so 24 hours are added to the (negative) difference.
add a date to the time
like
a = '1/1/2000 11:00 PM'
b = '1/1/2000 07:30 AM'
the convert the string to datetime
x=str2num(strrep(a,':',''))
y=str2num(strrep(b,':',''))
then fine the difference between 2 dates
e = etime(x,y)
this will give you number of seconds between both times

method for converting seconds from date to datetime

Is there a method in matlab to convert seconds from a known date to a standard date time format?
For example, if I have a vector of values shown as seconds from 1901/01/01, how would I convert them to a dateTime? In this case a value of 28125 would correspond to 1981/01/01. Is there an efficient method for doing this?
The numbers in your example do not make sense so it is not clear if your time is in seconds or days but since you asked for seconds I will use this.
What you want to achieve can be done using datenum function. This function returns the number of (fractional) days from 1/1/0000. So first you need to find your offset, e.g.:
offsetInDays = datenum(1901,1,1);
Next, you convert the date from seconds to days:
dateInDays = YourRequiredDateInSec * 3600 * 24;
Finally, you date is given by
RequiredDate = datestr(offsetInDays + dateInDays);

Getting datenum of predefined days, Matlab

I can get datenum of today
Daynum=datenum(fix(clock))
But how can I get it
yesterday
7 days earlier
6-11-2015
I need all three above listed days. I know some of these are already integrated in new version but I don't have Matlab 2015.
The output of datenum is:
A serial date number represents the whole and fractional number of
days from a fixed, preset date (January 0, 0000).
So to get yesterday you could do:
Daynum_yesterday = datenum(fix(clock)) - 1;
And 7 days ago would be:
Daynum_7days = datenum(fix(clock)) - 7;
If you have a specific date you can already pass it to datenum, with an optional format specifier:
Daynum_mydate = datenum('6-11-2015');
% or
Daynum_mydate = datenum('6-11-2015', 'mm-dd-yyyy');
Which return the same result.
We can test all of these using datestr:
str_yesterday = datestr(Daynum_yesterday);
str_7days = datestr(Daynum_7days);
str_mydate = datestr(Daynum_mydate);
Which returns:
str_yesterday =
16-Nov-2015 07:44:41
str_7days =
10-Nov-2015 07:44:41
str_mydate =
11-Jun-2015
Edit: And an obligatory Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time citation.

Vectorising Date Array Calculations

I simply want to generate a series of dates 1 year apart from today.
I tried this
CurveLength=30;
t=zeros(CurveLength);
t(1)=datestr(today);
x=2:CurveLength-1;
t=addtodate(t(1),x,'year');
I am getting two errors so far?
??? In an assignment A(I) = B, the number of elements in B and
Which I am guessing is related to the fact that the date is a string, but when I modified the string to be the same length as the date dd-mmm-yyyy i.e. 11 letters I still get the same error.
Lsstly I get the error
??? Error using ==> addtodate at 45
Quantity must be a numeric scalar.
Which seems to suggest that the function can't be vectorised? If this is true is there anyway to tell in advance which functions can be vectorised and which can not?
To add n years to a date x, you do this:
y = addtodate(x, n, 'year');
However, addtodate requires the following:
x must be a scalar number, not a string.
n must be a scalar number, not a vector.
Hence the errors you get.
I suggest you use a loop to do this:
CurveLength = 30;
t = zeros(CurveLength, 1);
t(1) = today; % # Whatever today equals to...
for ii = 2:CurveLength
t(ii) = addtodate(t(1), ii - 1, 'year');
end
Now that you have all your date values, you can convert it to strings with:
datestr(t);
And here's a neat one-liner using arrayfun;
datestr(arrayfun(#(n)addtodate(today, n, 'year'), 0:CurveLength))
If you're sequence has a constant known start, you can use datenum in the following way:
t = datenum( startYear:endYear, 1, 1)
This works fine also with months, days, hours etc. as long as the sequence doesn't run into negative numbers (like 1:-1:-10). Then months and days behave in a non-standard way.
Here a solution without a loop (possibly faster):
CurveLength=30;
t=datevec(repmat(now(),CurveLength,1));
x=[0:CurveLength-1]';
t(:,1)=t(:,1)+x;
t=datestr(t)
datevec splits the date into six columns [year, month, day, hour, min, sec]. So if you want to change e.g. the year you can just add or subtract from it.
If you want to change the month just add to t(:,2). You can even add numbers > 12 to the month and it will increase the year and month correctly if you transfer it back to a datenum or datestr.

find mean or median date of event

I have a dataset for which I have extracted the date at which an event occurred. The date is in the format of MMDDYY although MatLab does not show leading zeros so often it's MDDYY.
Is there a method to find the mean or median (I could use either) date? median works fine when there is an odd number of days but for even numbers I believe it is averaging the two middle ones which doesn't produce sensible values. I've been trying to convert the dates to a MatLab format with regexp and put it back together but I haven't gotten it to work. Thanks
dates=[32381 41081 40581 32381 32981 41081 40981 40581];
You can use datenum to convert dates to a serial date number (1 at 01/01/0000, 2 at 02/01/0000, 367 at 01/01/0001, etc.):
strDate='27112011';
numDate = datenum(strDate,'ddmmyyyy')
Any arithmetic operation can then be performed on these date numbers, like taking a mean or median:
mean(numDates)
median(numDates)
The only problem here, is that you don't have your dates in a string type, but as numbers. Luckily datenum also accepts numeric input, but you'll have to give the day, month and year separated in a vector:
numDate = datenum([year month day])
or as rows in a matrix if you have multiple timestamps.
So for your specified example data:
dates=[32381 41081 40581 32381 32981 41081 40981 40581];
years = mod(dates,100);
dates = (dates-years)./100;
days = mod(dates,100);
months = (dates-days)./100;
years = years + 1900; % set the years to the 20th century
numDates = datenum([years(:) months(:) days(:)]);
fprintf('The mean date is %s\n', datestr(mean(numDates)));
fprintf('The median date is %s\n', datestr(median(numDates)));
In this example I converted the resulting mean and median back to a readable date format using datestr, which takes the serial date number as input.
Try this:
dates=[32381 41081 40581 32381 32981 41081 40981 40581];
d=zeros(1,length(dates));
for i=1:length(dates)
d(i)=datenum(num2str(dates(i)),'ddmmyy');
end
m=mean(d);
m_str=datestr(m,'dd.mm.yy')
I hope this info to be useful, regards
Store the dates as YYMMDD, rather than as MMDDYY. This has the useful side effect that the numeric order of the dates is also the chronological order.
Here is the pseudo-code for a function that you could write.
foreach date:
year = date % 100
date = (date - year) / 100
day = date % 100
date = (date - day) / 100
month = date
newdate = year * 100 * 100 + month * 100 + day
end for
Once you have the dates in YYMMDD format, then find the median (numerically), and this is also the median chronologically.
You see above how to present dates as numbers.
I will add no your issue of finding median of the list. The default matlab median function will average the two middle values when there are an even number of values.
But you can do it yourself! Try this:
dates; % is your array of dates in numeric form
sdates = sort(dates);
mediandate = sdates(round((length(sdates)+1)/2));