spdiags and features scaling - matlab

Question

According to libsvm faqs, the following one-line code scale each feature to the range of [0,1] in Matlab
(data - repmat(min(data,[],1),size(data,1),1))*spdiags(1./(max(data,[],1)-min(data,[],1))',0,size(data,2),size(data,2))
so I'm using this code:
v_feature_trainN=(v_feature_train - repmat(mini,size(v_feature_train,1),1))*spdiags(1./(maxi-mini)',0,size(v_feature_train,2),size(v_feature_train,2));
v_feature_testN=(v_feature_test - repmat(mini,size(v_feature_test,1),1))*spdiags(1./(maxi-mini)',0,size(v_feature_test,2),size(v_feature_test,2));
where I use the first one to train the classifier and the second one to classify...
In my humble opinion scaling should be performed by:
i.e.:
v_feature_trainN2=(v_feature_train -min(v_feature_train(:)))./(max(v_feature_train(:))-min((v_feature_train(:))));
v_feature_test_N2=(v_feature_test -min(v_feature_train(:)))./(max(v_feature_train(:))-min((v_feature_train(:))));
Now I compared the classification results using these two scaling methods and the first one outperforms the second one.
The question are:
1) What exactly does the first method? I didn't understand it.
2) Why the code suggested by libsvm outperforms the second one (e.g. 80% vs 60%)?
Thank you so much in advance

Answer 1

First of all:
The code described in the libsvm does something different than your code:
It maps every column independently onto the interval [0,1].
Your code however uses the global min and max to map all the columns using the same affine transformation instead of a separate transformation for each column.
The first code works in the following way:
(data - repmat(min(data,[],1),size(data,1),1))
This subtracts each column's minimum from the entire column. It does this by computing the row vector of minima min(data,[],1) which is then replicated to build a matrix the same size as data. Then it is subtracted from data.
spdiags(1./(max(data,[],1)-min(data,[],1))',0,size(data,2),size(data,2))
This generates a diagonal matrix. The entry (i,i) of this matrix is 1 divided by the difference of the maximum and the minimum of the ith column: max(data(:,i))-min(data(:,i)).
The right multiplication of this diagonal matrix means: Multiply each column of the left matrix with the corresponding diagonal entry. This effectively divides column i by max(data(:,i))-min(data(:,i)).
Instead of using a sparse diagonal matrix, you could do this even more efficiently with bsxfun:
bsxfun(#rdivide, ...
bsxfun(#minus, ...
data, min(data,[],1)), ...
max(data,[],1)-min(data,[],1))
Which is the matlab way of writing:
Divide:
The difference of:
each column and its respective minimum
by the difference of each column's max and min.

Answer 2

I know this has already been answered correctly, but I would like to present another solution that I think is also correct and I found more intuitive/shorther then the one presented by knedlsepp. I am new to matlab and as I was studying knedlsepp solution, I found it more intuitive to solve this problem with the following formula:
function [ output ] = feature_scaling( y)
output = (y - repmat(min(y),size(y,1),1)) * diag(1./(max(y) - min(y)));
end
I find it a bit easier to use diag this way instead of spdiags, but I believe it produces the same result for the purpose of this excercise.
Multiplying the first term by the second, effectively divides each member of the matrix (Y-min(Y)) by the scalar value 1/(max(y)-min(y)), achieving the desired result.
In case someone prefers a shorter version, maybe this can be of help.