I run through a for loop, each time extracting certain elements of an array, say element1, element2, etc. How do I then pool all of the elements I've extracted together so that I have a list of them?
John covered the basics of for loops, so...
Note that matlab code is often more efficient if you vectorize it instead of using loops (this is less true than it used to be). For example, if in your loop you're just grabbing the first value in every row of a matrix, instead of looping you can do:
yourValues = theMatrix(:,1)
Where the solo : operator indicates "every possible value for this index". If you're just starting out in matlab it is definitely worthwhile to read up on matrix indexing in matlab (among other topics).
Build the list as you go:
for i = 1:whatever
' pick out theValue
yourList(i) = theValue
end
I'm assuming that you pick out one element per loop iteration. If not, just maintain a counter and use that instead of i.
Also, I'm not assuming you're pulling out your elements from the same position in your array each time through the loop. If you're doing that, then look into Donnie's suggestion.
In MATLAB, you can always perform a loop operation. But the recommended "MATLAB" way is to avoid looping:
Suppose you want to get the subset of array items
destArray = [];
for k=1:numel(sourceArray)
if isGoodMatch(sourceArray(k))
destArray = [destArray, sourceArray(k)]; % This will create a warning about resizing
end
end
You perform the same task without looping:
matches = arrayfun(#(a) isGoodMatch(a), sourceArray); % returns a vector of bools
destArray = sourceArray(matches);
Related
I would like to find or implement a Matlab data structure that allows me to efficiently do the following three things:
Retrieve an element uniformly at random.
Add a new element.
Delete an element. (If it helps, this element was just "retrieved" out of the structure, so I can use both its location and its value to delete it).
Since I don't need duplicates, this structure is mathematically equivalent to a set. Also, my elements are always integers in the range 1 to 2500; it is not unusual for the set to be this entire range.
What is such a data structure? I've thought of using something like containers.Map or java.util.HashSet, but I don't know how to satisfy the first requirement in this case, because I don't know how to efficiently retrieve the nth key of such a structure. An ordinary array can achieve the first requirement of course, but it is a bad choice for the second and third requirements because of inefficient resizing.
For some context for why I'm looking to do this, in some current code I spent about 1/4 of the runtime doing:
find(x>0,Inf)
and then randomly retrieving an element from this vector. Yet this vector changes very little, and in a very predictable manner, in each iteration of my program. So I would prefer to carry around a data structure and update it as I go rather than recomputing it every time.
If you're familiar with Haskell, one way to implement the operations I'm looking to support would be
randomSelect set = fmap (\n -> elemAt n set) $ randomRIO (0,size set-1)
along with insert and delete, from Data.Set. But I have other reasons not to use Haskell in this project, and I don't know how to implement the backend of Data.Set myself.
Frequently, the best way to decrease time complexity is to increase space complexity. Given that your sets are going to be rather small, we can probably afford to use a little extra space.
To contain the set itself, you can use a preallocated array:
maxSize = 2500;
theSet = zeros(1, maxSize); % set elements
setCount = 0; % number of set elements
You can then have an auxiliary array to check for set membership:
isMember = zeros(1, maxSize);
To insert a new element newval into the set, add it to the end of theSet and increment the count (assuming there's room):
if ~isMember(newval)
assert(setCount < maxSize, 'Too many elements in set.');
theSet(++setCount) = newval;
isMember(newval) = 1;
else
% tried to add duplicate element... do something here
end
To delete an element by index delidx, swap the element to be deleted and the last element and decrement the count:
assert(delidx <= setCount, 'Tried to remove element beyond end of set.');
isMember(theSet(delidx)) = 0;
theSet(delidx) = theSet(setCount--);
Getting a random element of the set is then simple, just:
randidx = randi(setCount);
randelem = theSet(randidx);
All operations are O(1) and the only real disadvantage is that we have to carry along two arrays of size maxCount. Because of that you probably don't want to put these operations in functions as you'd end up creating new arrays on every function call. You'd be better off putting them inline or, better yet, wrapping them in a nice class.
I am a beginner in Matlab and have not been able to find an answer to my question so far. Your help will definitely be very much appreciated.
I have 70 matrices (100x100), named SUBJ_1, SUBJ_2 etc. I would like to create a loop so that I would calculate some metrics (i.e. max and min values) for each matrix, and save the output in a 70x2 result matrix (where each row would correspond to the consecutively named SUBJ_ matrix).
I am struggling with both stages - how to use the names of individual variables in a 'for' loop and how to properly save individual outputs in a combined array.
Many thanks and all the best!
Don't use such variable names, create a big cell array named SUBJ and put each Matrix in it.
r=zeros(numel(SUBJ),2)
for idx=1:numel(SUBJ)
r(idx,1)=min(min(SUBJ{idx}))
r(idx,2)=max(max(SUBJ{idx}))
end
min and max are called twice because first call creates maximum among rows, second call among columns.
Even though this is in principle possible in Matlab, I would not recommend it: too slow and cumbersome to implement.
You could instead use a 3-D matrix (100x100x70) SUBJ which would contain all the SUBJ_1 etc. in one matrix. This would allow you to calculate min/max etc. with just one line of code. Matlab will take care of the loops internally:
OUTPUT(:,1) = min(min(SUBJ,[],1)[],2);
OUTPUT(:,2) = max(max(SUBJ,[],1)[],2);
Like this, OUTPUT(1,1) contains min(min(SUBJ(:,:,1))) and so on...
As to how to use the names of individual variables in a 'for' loop, here gives an example:
SUBJ = [];
for idx = 1:70
term = eval(['SUBJ_',num2str(idx)]);
SUBJ = [SUBJ; max(max(term)),min(min(term))];
end
I am trying to use MATLAB in order to simulate a communications encoding and decoding mechanism. Hence all of the data will be 0's or 1's.
Initially I created a vector of a specific length and populated with 0's and 1's using
source_data = rand(1,8192)<.7;
For encoding I need to perform XOR operations multiple times which I was able to do without any issue.
For the decoding operation I need to implement the Gaussian Elimination method to solve the set of equations where I realized this vector representation is not very helpful. I tried to use strcat to append multiple 0's and 1's to a variable a using a for loop:
for i=1:8192
if(mod(i,2)==0)
a = strcat(a,'0');
else
a = strcat(a,'1');
end
i = i+1;
disp(i);
end
when I tried length(a) after this I found that the length was 16384, which is twice 8192. I am not sure where I am going wrong or how best to tackle this.
Did you reinitialize a before the example code? Sounds like you ran it twice without clearing a in between, or started with a already 8192 long.
Growing an array in a loop like this in Matlab is inefficient. You can usually find a vectorized way to do stuff like this. In your case, to get an 8192-long array of alternating ones and zeros, you can just do this.
len = 8192;
a = double(mod(1:len,2) == 0);
And logicals might be more suited to your code, so you could skip the double() call.
There are probably a few answer/questions here. Firstly, how can one go from an arbitrary vector containing {0,1} elements to a string? One way would be to use cellfun with the converter num2str:
dataDbl = rand(1,8192)<.7; %see the original question
dataStr = cellfun(#num2str, num2cell(dataDbl));
Note that cellfun concatenates uniform outputs.
I am trying to use MATLAB in order to generate a variable whose elements are either 0 or 1. I want to define this variable using some kind of concatenation (equivalent of Java string append) so that I can add as many 0's and 1's according to some upper limit.
I can only think of using a for loop to append values to an existing variable. Something like
variable=1;
for i=1:N
if ( i%2==0)
variable = variable.append('0')
else
variable = variable.append('1')
i=i+1;
end
Is there a better way to do this?
In MATLAB, you can almost always avoid a loop by treating arrays in a vectorized way.
The result of pseudo-code you provided can be obtained in a single line as:
variable = mod((1:N),2);
The above line generates a row vector [1,2,...,N] (with the code (1:N), use (1:N)' if you need a column vector) and the mod function (as most MATLAB functions) is applied to each element when it receives an array.
That's not valid Matlab code:
The % indicates the start of a comment, hence introducing a syntax error.
There is no append method (at least not for arrays).
Theres no need to increment the index in a for loop.
Aside of that it's a bad idea to have Matlab "grow" variables, as memory needs to be reallocated at each time, slowing it down considerably. The correct approach is:
variable=zeros(N,1);
for i=1:N
variable(i)=mod(i,2);
end
If you really do want to grow variables (some times it is inevitable) you can use this:
variable=[variable;1];
Use ; for appending rows, use , for appending columns (does the same as vertcat and horzcat). Use cat if you have more than 2 dimensions in your array.
I want to apply a function to all columns in a matrix with MATLAB. For example, I'd like to be able to call smooth on every column of a matrix, instead of having smooth treat the matrix as a vector (which is the default behaviour if you call smooth(matrix)).
I'm sure there must be a more idiomatic way to do this, but I can't find it, so I've defined a map_column function:
function result = map_column(m, func)
result = m;
for col = 1:size(m,2)
result(:,col) = func(m(:,col));
end
end
which I can call with:
smoothed = map_column(input, #(c) (smooth(c, 9)));
Is there anything wrong with this code? How could I improve it?
The MATLAB "for" statement actually loops over the columns of whatever's supplied - normally, this just results in a sequence of scalars since the vector passed into for (as in your example above) is a row vector. This means that you can rewrite the above code like this:
function result = map_column(m, func)
result = [];
for m_col = m
result = horzcat(result, func(m_col));
end
If func does not return a column vector, then you can add something like
f = func(m_col);
result = horzcat(result, f(:));
to force it into a column.
Your solution is fine.
Note that horizcat exacts a substantial performance penalty for large matrices. It makes the code be O(N^2) instead of O(N). For a 100x10,000 matrix, your implementation takes 2.6s on my machine, the horizcat one takes 64.5s. For a 100x5000 matrix, the horizcat implementation takes 15.7s.
If you wanted, you could generalize your function a little and make it be able to iterate over the final dimension or even over arbitrary dimensions (not just columns).
Maybe you could always transform the matrix with the ' operator and then transform the result back.
smoothed = smooth(input', 9)';
That at least works with the fft function.
A way to cause an implicit loop across the columns of a matrix is to use cellfun. That is, you must first convert the matrix to a cell array, each cell will hold one column. Then call cellfun. For example:
A = randn(10,5);
See that here I've computed the standard deviation for each column.
cellfun(#std,mat2cell(A,size(A,1),ones(1,size(A,2))))
ans =
0.78681 1.1473 0.89789 0.66635 1.3482
Of course, many functions in MATLAB are already set up to work on rows or columns of an array as the user indicates. This is true of std of course, but this is a convenient way to test that cellfun worked successfully.
std(A,[],1)
ans =
0.78681 1.1473 0.89789 0.66635 1.3482
Don't forget to preallocate the result matrix if you are dealing with large matrices. Otherwise your CPU will spend lots of cycles repeatedly re-allocating the matrix every time it adds a new row/column.
If this is a common use-case for your function, it would perhaps be a good idea to make the function iterate through the columns automatically if the input is not a vector.
This doesn't exactly solve your problem but it would simplify the functions' usage. In that case, the output should be a matrix, too.
You can also transform the matrix to one long column by using m(:,:) = m(:). However, it depends on your function if this would make sense.