How to compare two cell elements in matlab? - matlab

Question

I am using two cells for storing the targeted and the expected value of a neural network process in matlab. I have used two 1*1 cell array for storing the values respectively. And here is my code.
cinfo=cell(1,2)
cinfo(1,1)=iter(1,10)%value is retrieved from a dataset iter
cinfo(1,2)=iter(1,11)
amp1=cinfo(1,1);
amp2=cinfo(1,2);
if amp1 == amp2
message=sprintf('NOT DETECTED BY THE DISEASE');
uiwait(msgbox(message));
But when i run the above code, the get the following error :
??? Undefined function or method 'eq' for input arguments of type 'cell'.
Error in ==> comparison at line 38
if amp1 == amp2
How to solve this problem?

Answer 1

The problem is how you indexed things. A 1x1 cell array does not make a lot of sense, instead get the actual element in the single cell, by indexing with curly brackets:
amp1=cinfo{1,1}; # get the actual element from the cell array, and not just a
amp2=cinfo{1,2}; # 1x1 cell array by indexing with {}
if (amp1 == amp2)
## etc...
However, note that if amp1 and amp2 are not scalars the above will act weird. Instead, do
if (all (amp1 == amp2))
## etc...

Answer 2

Use isequal. That will work even if the cell's contents have different sizes.
Example:
cinfo=cell(1,2);
cinfo(1,1) = {1:10}; %// store vector of 10 numbers in cell 1
cinfo(1,2) = {1:20}; %// store vector of 20 numbers in cell 2
amp1 = cinfo(1,1); %// single cell containing a length-10 numeric vector
amp2 = cinfo(1,2); %// single cell containing a length-20 numeric vector
if isequal(amp1,amp2)
%// ...
In this example, which parallels your code, amp1 and amp2 are cell arrays consisting of a single cell which contains a numeric vector. Another possibility is to directly store each cell's contents into amp1, amp2, and then compare them:
amp1 = cinfo{1,1}; %// length-10 numeric vector
amp2 = cinfo{1,2}; %// length-20 numeric vector
if isequal(amp1,amp2)
%// ...
Note that even in this case, the comparisons amp1==amp1 or all(amp1==amp2) would give an error, because the vectors have different sizes.