DataFrameMatlab overview

Objective

MATLAB functions to process delimited text files. Using structures similar to R's Data Frames, MATLAB can manipulate tabular heterogeneous data for statistical analaysis.

Contents

In this context, a data frame is a structure of arrays where each array is column-oriented, one dimensional and has the same number of elements as every other column.

Essential File I/O

• DFread - load a tab delimited text file into a data frame
• DFwrite - write a tab delimited text file from a data frame
• DFkeeprow - make subset of a data frame given row indices

Essential data manipulation

• DFindex - generate an index for a data frame for any number of fields
• DFcat - concatenate rows from structure of array onto a data frame
• DFjoin - perform a join between two files (or structures of arrays)
• DFkeepcol - keep only listed fields from a data frame
• DFfrommat - make a data frame from a matrix and an array of strings
• DFsort - sort a data frame based on any number of fields
• DFtomat - make a matrix and an array of strings from a data frame
• DFunmerge - unmerge rows from a structure
• DFverify - test that all arrays in data frame are of equal size

Essential utilities (dependencies)

• cell2delim - concatenate a cell array of strings into a delimited char array
• conv2str - converts any (non-structure) input to a single string,
• makevert - make any dimensional matrix or comma separated list into a column vector
• strsplitdf - split a string into a cell array based on a single character delimiter
• uniquenotmiss - find the unique values of a (cell) array (ignore NaN and '')

Useful functions

• DFfilter - filter rows from a data frame
• DFgetgood - perform quality control on a data frame or a file path to a tab-text file
• DFisnum - determine whether all fields in a data frame have type logical or numeric
• DFpivot - pivot a data frame based on values of a field
• DFrenamecol - rename fields from a data frame
• DFrmcol - remove listed fields from a data frame
• DFvalues - structure with fields of unique values from input data frame
• DFview - display char matrix representing contents of data frame

Other utilities

• rowcol2well - convert arrays of rows and columns to array of wells
• well2rowcol - convert cell array of wells to cell array of Rows and vector of Cols
• getfirst - return first element of an array or null
• getlast - return last element of an array or null
• isint - true for arrays containing only integer values, regardless of type
• notindex - return list of indices not contained in a list of indices
• num2colidx - return column vector of numbers between one and a given number
• well2id - convert cell array of wells to numerical id's in column-major order

Optional functions

• DFtostruct - convert between a data frame and an array of structures