MATLAB: Apply function along dimension

Question

Hi,

I am trying to find a way to determine if all elements in a hyperplane of an n-dimensional array are NaNs. To exemplify, with a 4-D array of size (3,5,2,7), I would like to determine along dimension 2 which of the 5 sub-arrays (hyperplanes) of size (3,1,2,7) are filled with just NaNs. The result should be a 5 elems vector (the size of the original array along dimension 2) containing true or false depending on whether there are just NaNs or not in the corresponding sub-array. The for loop answer would be

% A = <3,5,2,7>
  z = false(size(A,2),1);
  for i = 1:size(A,2)
     % turning each sub-array in a column vector and perform the check
     z(i) = all(isnan(reshape(A(:,i,:,:),prod(size(A(:,i,:,:))),1)));
  end

Since the arrays I work with are quite large this seems impractical, plus the dimension along which to perform the check is not given at the outset, but itself an argument of the function (i.e. A(:,i,:,:) would not work, because it should be A(:,:,i,:) if the check was performed along dimension 3). I think bsxfun and/or arrayfun could help in this regard, but their complex implementation doesn't help. Any suggestions on how this might be achieved?

Thanks in advance

Dan

Answer 1

Does this do what you want?

% x = nD array, k = dimension to check for all NaN's per plane
function result = nanplane(x,k)
z = 1:numel(size(x));
X = permute(x,[z(k) z(1:k-1) z(k+1:end)]);
X = reshape(X,size(X,1),[]);
result = all(isnan(X),2);
end