How do you work with qualitative data in Matlab?

I am working with data from excel that is a table of inputs that look like DC001, DC002, DC003 and so on. Is there a way to work with this data? I'm having trouble because the entires contain letters. So when I import the data, each cell looks like 'DC001', 'DC002', 'DC003' and so on. I'm trying to count the occurrences of each but when I try to reference what's in the cell I get an error. Thanks

[Kelly Kearney]

How are you trying to reference the data? And what error are you getting?

Answer 1

[Kirby Fears]

Hi Jennie,

To access the contents of a cell, use curly braces.

>> X={'hey','hey','hi','hello'};
>> X{1}

ans =

hey

To count the number of times each name appears (names like DC001, DC002), I have some sample code below that should work for you.

>> X={'hey','hey','hi','hello'};
>> [uniqX,~,idx]=unique(X(:));
>> count=accumarray(idx,1);
>> countsummary=[uniqX,num2cell(count)]

countsummary = 
    'hello'    [1]
    'hey'      [2]
    'hi'       [1]

The end result is a cell with unique names in the left column and the number of occurrences in the right column.

Hope this helps.