Find row-wise minima in sparse matrix - matlab

Question

I would like to get the minimum nonzero values per row in a sparse matrix. Solutions I found for dense matrices suggested masking out the zero values by setting them to NaN or Inf. However, this obviously doesn't work for sparse matrices.
Ideally, I should get a column vector of all the row-wise minima, as I would get with
minValues = min( A, [], 2);
Except, obviously, using min leaves me with an all-zeros column vector due to the sparsity. Is there a solution using find?

Answer 1

This is perfect for accumarray. Consider the following sparse matrix,
vals = [3 1 1 9 7 4 10 1]; % got this from randi(10,1,8)
S = sparse([1 3 4 4 5 5 7 9],[2 2 3 6 7 8 8 11],vals);
Get the minimum value for each row, assuming 0 for empty elements:
[ii,jj] = find(S);
rowMinVals = accumarray(ii,nonzeros(S),[],#min)
Note that rows 4 and 5 of rowMinVals, which are the only two rows of S with multiple nonzero values are equal to the min of the row:
rowMinVals =
3
0
1
1 % min([1 9]
4 % min([7 4]
0
10
0
1
If the last row(s) of your sparse matrix do not contain any non-zeros, but you want your min row value output to reflect that you have numRows, for example, change theaccumarray command as follows,
rowMinVals = accumarray(ii,nonzeros(S),[numRows 1],#min).
Also, perhaps you also want to avoid including the default 0 in the output. One way to handle that is to set the fillval input argument to NaN:
rowMinVals = accumarray(ii,nonzeros(S),[numRows 1],#min,NaN)
rowMinVals =
3
NaN
1
1
4
NaN
10
NaN
1
NaN
NaN
NaN
Or you can keep using a sparse matrix with the fifth input argument, issparse:
>> rowMinVals = accumarray(ii,nonzeros(S),[],#min,[],true)
rowMinVals =
(1,1) 3
(3,1) 1
(4,1) 1
(5,1) 4
(7,1) 10
(9,1) 1