matlab updating time vector - matlab

Question

I have 19 cells (19x1) with temperature data for an entire year where the first 18 cells represent 20 days (each) and the last cell represents 5 days, hence (18*20)+5 = 365days.
In each cell there should be 7200 measurements (apart from cell 19) where each measurement is taken every 4 minutes thus 360 measurements per day (360*20 = 7200).
The time vector for the measurements is only expressed as day number i.e. 1,2,3...and so on (thus no decimal day),
which is therefore displayed as 360 x 1's... and so on.
As the sensor failed during some days, some of the cells contain less than 7200 measurements, where one in
particular only contains 858 rows, which looks similar to the following example:
a=rand(858,3);
a(1:281,1)=1;
a(281:327,1)=2;
a(327:328,1)=5;
a(329:330,1)=9;
a(331:498,1)=19;
a(499:858,1)=20;
Where column 1 = day, column 2 and 3 are the data.
By knowing that each day number should be repeated 360 times is there a method for including an additional
amount of every value from 1:20 in order to make up the 360. For example, the first column requires
79 x 1's, 46 x 2's, 360 x 3's... and so on; where the final array should therefore have 7200 values in
order from 1 to 20.
If this is possible, in the rows where these values have been added, the second and third column should
changed to nan.
I realise that this is an unusual question, and that it is difficult to understand what is asked, but I hope I have been clear in expressing what i'm attempting to
acheive. Any advice would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Here's one way to do it for a given element of the cell matrix:
full=zeros(7200,3)+NaN;
for i = 1:20 % for each day
starti = (i-1)*360; % find corresponding 360 indices into full array
full( starti + (1:360), 1 ) = i; % assign the day
idx = find(a(:,1)==i); % find any matching data in a for that day
full( starti + (1:length(idx)), 2:3 ) = a(idx,2:3); % copy matching data over
end
You could probably use arrayfun to make this slicker, and maybe (??) faster.
You could make this into a function and use cellfun to apply it to your cell.
PS - if you ask your question at the Matlab help forums you'll most definitely get a slicker & more efficient answer than this. Probably involving bsxfun or arrayfun or accumarray or something like that.
Update - to do this for each element in the cell array the only change is that instead of searching for i as the day number you calculate it based on how far allong the cell array you are. You'd do something like (untested):
for k = 1:length(cellarray)
for i = 1:length(cellarray{k})
starti = (i-1)*360; % ... as before
day = (k-1)*20 + i; % first cell is days 1-20, second is 21-40,...
full( starti + (1:360),1 ) = day; % <-- replace i with day
idx = find(a(:,1)==day); % <-- replace i with day
full( starti + (1:length(idx)), 2:3 ) = a(idx,2:3); % same as before
end
end

Answer 2

I am not sure I understood correctly what you want to do but this below works out how many measurements you are missing for each day and add at the bottom of your 'a' matrix additional lines so you do get the full 7200x3 matrix.
nbMissing = 7200-size(a,1);
a1 = nan(nbmissing,3)
l=0
for i = 1:20
nbMissing_i = 360-sum(a(:,1)=i);
a1(l+1:l+nbMissing_i,1)=i;
l = l+nb_Missing_i;
end
a_filled = [a;a1];