MATLAB for complete novices

Roland Memisevic

January 18, 2007

Why MATLAB ?

Easy to learn. Many useful features (toolboxes). Standard!

Excellent documentation.
Can use MATLAB to learn some math itself!

Caveats

Has some disadvantages, too:

Starting MATLAB...

At the command prompt type: matlab Or, if you dont like windows: matlab -nodesktop Get help any time with help function-name To exit: exit

Working with MATLAB

The MATLAB-prompt behaves in many ways like a standard UNIX-prompt.

MATLAB can be (and usually is) used interactively! MATLAB is verbose: Shows results immediately You can suppress this by ending the line with ;

Operations
To use MATLAB, enter stu at the command prompt: 5*7 Some simple operations: +,-,*,^,/,==,<,>,~= To use variables, assign to them: x = 5 y = 234 x * y Some simple functions: sin, cos, exp, log, sqrt, ...

Matrices
To enter matrices use [, ] Separate columns with , or Separate lines with ; A = [1 2 3; 4 5 6] yields A = [1 2 3 4 3 6] Important shortcut is : : Works like this: 1 : 0.5 : 3 gives you [1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 Access matrix elements with ( ). For example A(2,2) = 3 Note: Indexes start at one!

3.0]

Working with vectors and matrices

Most functions mentioned before are performed element-wise. Two exceptions are * and ^ To make these element-wise, use dot-notation: .* and .^ You can summarize vectors (and matrices) with min, max, mean, sum, ... For example: min([3, 2, 4, 5, 6]) = 2

Matrix algebra

Standard matrix algebra rules apply. E.g. [1,2]*[1,2] = ? [1,2]*[1,2] = ? To transpose use

Working with vectors and matrices

Special functions for quickly building big matrices: zeros, ones, rand, randn, eye Work like this:
To get a 3 3-matrix lled with zeros, type zeros(3) To get a 3 1-matrix lled with zeros, type zeros(3,1) Etc.

The other functions similarly.

Scripts and functions

Can write scripts by stacking commands in a le ending in .m Similarly, dene functions by starting the le with function [y] = myfunction(x) The value of y will be the return value. The name of the le will be the function name. Comments start with % Example: function [y] = timestwo(x) y = 2*x % multiply by two...

for, while, if ...

while-loops
i = 1.1 while i<=2 i = i^2 end

conditionals
i = sin(2.1374) if i < 0.5 i = i^2 end

Plotting

To plot use plot. For example x = 1 : 0.5 : 10; y = sin(x); plot(x,y) You can use an additional string argument. One example: plot(x,y, r--) Use help plot for more on this. Overlay plots using hold on/o

More plotting
Change labeling with xlabel, ylabel, title. Generate subplots with subplot. Display matrices with imagesc. E.g. A = rand(10) subplot(1,2,1) imagesc(A) B = (1:0.1:10)*(1:0.1:10) subplot(1,2,2) imagesc(B) Other: plot3, scatter, bar, hist, ...

Slicing and logical indexing

Can refer to slices of matrices using : Example: Let a = eye(3); a(1, :) = [1, 0, 0] and a(2, :) = [0, 1, 0], etc. You can use logical matrices to access elements of other matrices. ==, <, >, etc. actually return logical matrices (they work component-wise). So, if a = [1, 2, 3] you have:
a(a > 1) = [2, 3]