Making Test Data in MATLAB

(Originally posted on Doug's MATLAB Video Tutorials blog.)

Many times when trying to test an algorithm or understand code written by someone else, it is beneficial to run the code with data you understand already. For that purpose, I have several standard types of data that I can quickly load or synthesize. I know that these datasets do not have NaN, Inf, or any other entries that often wreck algorithms that do not need to handle them.