Vectorize function that finds an array of nearest values - matlab

Question

I am still wrapping my head around vectorization and I'm having a difficult time trying to resolve the following function I made...
for i = 1:size(X, 1)
min_n = inf;
for j=1:K
val = X(i,:)' - centroids(j,:)';
diff = val'*val;
if (diff < min_n)
idx(i) = j;
min_n = diff;
end
end
end
X is an array of (x,y) coordinates...
2 5
5 6
...
...
centroids in this example is limited to 3 rows. It is also in (x,y) format as shown above.
For every pair in X I am computing the closest pair of centroids. I then store the index of the centroid in idx.
So idx(i) = j means that I am storing the index j of the centroid at index i, where i corresponds to the index of X. This means the closest centroid to pair X(i, :) is at idx(i).
Can I possibly simplify this via vectorization? I struggle with just vectorizing the inner loop.

Answer 1

Here are three options. But please note that the disadvantage of vectorization, as compared to your double loops, is that it stores all the difference operation results at once, which means that if your matrices have many rows, you might run out of memory. On the other hand, the vectorized approach is probably much faster.
Option 1
If you have access to Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox, you can use the function pdist2 to get all the pairwise distances between rows of two matrices. Then, the min function gives you the minimum of each column of the result. Its first returned value are the minimal values, and its second are the indices, which is what you need for idx:
diff = pdist2(centroids,X);
[~,idx] = min(diff);
Option 2
If you don't have access to the toolbox, you can use bsxfun. This will let you compute the difference operation between the two matrices even if their dimensions don't agree. All you need to do is to use shiftdim to reshape X' to have size [1,size(X,2),size(X,1)], and then reshapedX and and centroids are compatible with their dimensions (see documentation of bsxfun). This lets you take the difference between their values. The result is a three dimensional array, which you need to sum along the second dimension to get the norm of the differences between rows. At this point you can proceed as in option 1.
reshapedX = shiftdim(X',-1);
diff = bsxfun(#minus,centroids,reshapedX);
diff = squeeze(sum(diff.^2,2));
[~,idx] = min(diff);
Note: Starting in the Matlab version 2016b, the bsxfun is used implicitly and you do not need to call it anymore. So the line with bsxfun can be replaced with the simpler line diff = centroids-reshapedX.
Option 3
Use the function dsearchn, which performs exactly what you need:
idx = dsearchn(centroids,X);

Answer 2

it could be done using pdist2 - pairwise distances between rows of two matrices:
% random data
X = rand(500,2);
centroids = rand(3,2);
% pairwise distances
D = pdist2(X,centroids);
% closest centroid index for each X coordinates
[~,idx] = min(D,[],2)
% plot
scatter(centroids(:,1),centroids(:,2),300,(1:size(centroids,1))','filled');
hold on;
scatter(X(:,1),X(:,2),30,idx);
legend('Centroids','data');