How to do operations on nested cell array?
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I have a nested cell array named 'events'.Each cell contains either 1 or more than 1 cells which in turn contains time series.
I want to write a code where, if the cell contains more than 1 cell arrays of time series, I want to find the standard deviation of each of those time series and retain only the time series with the highest standard deviation.
For ex: For the case of events {6,1} which contains 3 time series, I want to find the std of events{6,1}{1,1}, events{6,1}{2,1} and events{6,1}{3,1} and only retain the time series with the highest std and delete the rest.
How can I do this?
Thanks

Answers (2)
Walter Roberson
on 16 Jan 2020
Edited: Walter Roberson
on 16 Jan 2020
for K = 1 : numel(events)
[~, idx] = max(cellfun(@std, events{K}));
Events{K} = events{K}(idx);
end
I would not bother trying to do it without a loop. It is possible, yes, but avoiding the loop requires calculating the std twice because inside the loop it is not possible to get at the second output of max()
Turlough Hughes
on 16 Jan 2020
Edited: Turlough Hughes
on 16 Jan 2020
This should hopefully work but i ament able to test it myself right now as I'm away from my computer. The idea is to pass onecell at a time from the first level through a subfunction called myfun. myfun subsequently uses cellfun again to check each subcell, it finds the one with max standard deviation and should return that one.
EventsStdMax = cellfun(@(x) myfun(x),events,'UniformOutput',false)
function out = myfun(onecell)
[~,idx] = max(cellfun(@(x) std(x), onecell));
out = onecell{idx};
end
Edit: As Walter pointed out.
6 Comments
Walter Roberson
on 16 Jan 2020
out = subcell{idx};
should probably be
out = onecell{idx};
Turlough Hughes
on 16 Jan 2020
Thanks.
maruljay
on 16 Jan 2020
Walter Roberson
on 17 Jan 2020
Your screen snapshot shows the entries in events are cell arrays, but one of the entries between 28 and 58 is not a cell array (possibly it is unexpectedly [] instead of {})
maruljay
on 17 Jan 2020
Walter Roberson
on 17 Jan 2020
No, according to your images , the first 27 entries in events are not timeseries and are instead cell arrays containing timeseries. But somewhere in events you have an entry which is not a cell array.
cellfun(@class, events, 'uniform', 0)
and look for one that does not say 'cell'
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