Symmetric Matrix

I had a 4x4 symmetric matrix to be entered in Octave and I was lazy to feed redundant elements :), convincing myself that it is waste of time. Well, I spent more than that 'to be wasted' time browsing for how to enter symmetric matrices economically in Octave. Believe me, it was worth it. You never get bored fiddling with matrices and of course, Octave/Matlab.

What I found was not a single step solution, for that matter I could not get a single step way to do it at all. I was impressed by this solution for its elegance. Not just that, this solution caters to my requirement of feeding unique elements (either upper triangular or lower) exactly once. Okay, now on to the steps:

1) Say your matrix is as below:
    16    4    8    4
    4   10    8    4
    8    8   12   10
    4    4   10   12

Obviously symmetric - let's call this A


2) V=[16 4 10 8 8 12 4 4 10 12];

V holds all the upper (lower) triangular elements one column (row) at a time.

3) Create a triangular matrix of 1 of the same size as your A matrix as follows:

M = triu(ones(4))
M =

   1   1   1   1
   0   1   1   1
   0   0   1   1
   0   0   0   1

4) Replace the ones with elements from V as follows:

M(M==1)=V
M =

   16    4    8    4
    0   10    8    4
    0    0   12   10
    0    0    0   12


The M==1 test returns the indices of all places that has 1 in it, and the assignment takes care of replacing them with elements from V.

5) Add M with itself but after transposing and taking only the lower triangular portion (note M is an upper triangular one):

M = M + tril(M',-1)
M =

   16    4    8    4
    4   10    8    4
    8    8   12   10
    4    4   10   12

As you can see, M is A.

-1 in the tril command makes sure that you are leaving the main diagonal when retrieving the lower triangular portion of the transposed M.


So, as it looks it is a 4 step algorithm, but if you can create a script with these steps in it, it is only one step.

Now to credits: I got this tip from one of the threads of mathworks.com :), where else?!

Load multiple files in matlab/octave

1) When you have multiples files of the same extension in the same directory, if you are looking for same operation to be done on them using a script, follow below for loading all of them at once to the Matlab/Octave environment:

files = dir('*.txt');
for i=1:length(files)
eval(['load ' files(i).name ' -ascii']);
end


I am getting a warning message - ignoring extra args - still trying to figure out what it means.
By the way, I got this tip from Mathworks itself, exactly here.

2) As a small example, say the operation you do is finding size of the files. The below snippet shows how to use eval command on set of files with common prefix but different numeral suffix that are loaded as above.

for ii=1994:1999
s=['size(tst' int2str(ii) ')'];
eval(s)
end


3) While searching for such related Matlab commands, I came across this interesting and useful not-to-dos in Matlab:here

octave

I finished coding an important segment of the C++ program, which is part of my research. The following are the tips I learnt:

1) Octave has strcat and strsplit functions in addition to plethora of other string handling functions. More here and here too

2) To save variables in a file and eventually start appending to it:
save('fname','varname','-append');
The single quotes are important. fname is the file name, varname is the variable name and the last switch is obvious. Octave does a nice job of saving variables with information like name of the variable, its size etc.