MATLAB: Consider preallocating for speed

preallocating for speed

Hey there!!!!I am getting this preallocation warning.How can i fix this??Need your help!!
close all;
clear;
figure;
n=100000;
p=.301;
q=.15;
beta=10;
lambda=3;
timeofprobabilityestimation=60;
interval=.1;
for c=[400 500 600 700]
  i=1;
  pest=[];
  totaltime=zeros(n,1);
  for k=1:n
    x=sum(rand(c,1)<p);
    y=ceil(log(1-rand(x,1))/log(1-q));
    totaltasks=sum(y);
    t=sum(-1/lambda * log(rand(beta,totaltasks)));
    totaltime(k)=sum(t);
  end
  for timeval=0:60*interval:60*100
     
     pest(i)=mean(totaltime<timeval);%this is where i get warning
    
    i=i+1;
  end
  timeval=0:interval:100;
  plot(timeval,pest)
  hold on;
end
legend('400', '500' ,'600', '700')
title('Total time vs probability')
xlabel('total time less than h')
ylabel('probability')

Best Answer

This warning means that when you are calculating a vector or matrix element-by-element in a loop, MATLAB performs faster if the vector or matrix is initialized first, meaning that an amount of memory is allocated for the whole vector or matrix variable rather than memory for a single element having to be allocated each time the loop iterates. Obviously you can only preallocate if you know what size the vector or matrix will be before the loop starts, which luckily is the case in this case.
So when you initialize the variable pest, instead of setting it to be empty, you can set it to have 1001 elements (the number of iterations of the timeval loop). It doesn't matter what the value of pest is before the loop because each element will be overwritten by the loop, so it is customary to initialize with zeros:
% pest = []; % not preallocated
pest = zeros(1,100/interval+1); % preallocated to the correct size
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