Extracting portions of matrix into cell array - matlab

Question

I have a pretty large matrix M and I am only interested in a few of the columns. I have a boolean vector V where a value of 1 represents a column that is of interest. Example:
-1 -1 -1 7 7 -1 -1 -1 7 7 7
M = -1 -1 7 7 7 -1 -1 7 7 7 7
-1 -1 7 7 7 -1 -1 -1 7 7 -1
V = 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1
If multiple adjacent values of V are all 1, then I want the corresponding columns of M to be extracted into another matrix. Here's an example, using the matrices from before.
-1 7 7 -1 7 7 7
M1 = 7 7 7 M2 = 7 7 7 7
7 7 7 -1 7 7 -1
How might I do this efficiently? I would like all these portions of the matrix M to be stored in a cell array, or at least have an efficient way to generate them one after the other. Currently I'm doing this in a while loop and it is not as efficient as I'd like it to be.
(Note that my examples only include the values -1 and 7 just for clarity; this isn't the actual data I use.)

Answer 1

You can utilize the diff function for this, to break your V vector into blocks
% find where block differences exist
diffs = diff(V);
% move start index one value forward, as first value in
% diff represents diff between first and second in original vector
startPoints = find(diffs == 1) + 1;
endPoints = find(diffs == -1);
% if the first block begins with the first element diff won't have
% found start
if V(1) == 1
startPoints = [1 startPoints];
end
% if last block lasts until the end of the array, diff won't have found end
if length(startPoints) > length(endPoints)
endPoints(end+1) = length(V);
end
% subset original matrix into cell array with indices
results = cell(size(startPoints));
for c = 1:length(results)
results{c} = M(:,startPoints(c):endPoints(c));
end

Answer 2

The one thing I'm not sure of is if there's a better way to find the being_indices and end_indices.
Code:
X = [1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 16 17 18 19 20
1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 16 17 18 19 20];
V = logical([ 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1]);
find_indices = find(V);
begin_indices = [find_indices(1) find_indices(find(diff(find_indices) ~= 1)+1)];
end_indices = [find_indices(find(diff(find_indices) ~= 1)) find_indices(end)];
X_truncated = mat2cell(X(:,V),size(X,1),[end_indices-begin_indices]+1);
X_truncated{:}
Output:
ans =
1 2
6 7
11 12
16 17
1 2
6 7
11 12
16 17
ans =
5 1 2
10 6 7
15 11 12
20 16 17
5 1 2
10 6 7
15 11 12
20 16 17
ans =
4 5
9 10
14 15
19 20
4 5
9 10
14 15
19 20