splitting a matrix row-wise and and finding a linear regression coeff - matlab

Question

A= [1 1
2 2
3 3
. .
. .
. .
N N]
I have an [N,2] matrix and I need to split it row-wise into some number of [N/4,2] submatrices. Then for each submatrix I need to find linear regression where the first column of each submatrix is my x data and the second column is my y data. The output should be a struct with fields a,b,c,d.... and values of linear regression for each submatrix
First I tried splitting the matrix with mat2cell where k = length(N)/4 and mat = mat2cell(A, [k k k k], [1 1]).
Next I tried converting mat into struct with out = cell2struct(mat,fields,1) where fields = {'col1','col2'} and use
new = structfun(#(x)polyfit(x.col1, x.col2,1), out,'UniformOutput', false)
But I get the error:
Inputs to STRUCTFUN must be scalar structures.
Does anyone know how to do it? Many thanks

Answer 1

The most straightforawrd way (and probably the fastest) to do this is with a good old for loop:
A = [1:64;1:64]'; % Demo data
m = 4;
N = size(A,1);
k = N/m; % Assumes that length is evenly divisible by 4
c = zeros(m,2); % Coefficients
for i = 1:m
c(i,:) = polyfit(A((i-1)*k+1:i*k,1),A(i-1)*k+1:i*k,2),1);
end
Or rather than using cell2struct and structfun you can use cellfun:
A = [1:64;1:64]'; % Demo data
m = 4;
N = size(A,1);
k = N/m; % Assumes that length is evenly divisible by 4
c = cellfun(#(x)polyfit(x(:,1),x(:,2),1).',mat2cell(A,k+zeros(1,m),2),'UniformOutput',false)
or alternatively
Ac = mat2cell(A,k+zeros(1,m),[1 1])
c = cellfun(#(x1,x2)polyfit(x1,x2,1).',Ac(:,1),Ac(:,2),'UniformOutput',false)
You can convert the output of cellfun to a matrix with:
c = [c{:}].'
As for why you're getting the error, your variable out is a 4-by-1 struct array (array of structures) rather than a simple (scalar) structure of arrays. The documentation for structfun points out this requirement in the description of the short function: "Apply function to each field of scalar structure." This video from The MathWorks tries to explain the difference.