MATLAB: For loop using unique values

for loopunique

Have a 4 column matrix [DAY,MONTH,YEAR,DISCHARGE] and I am looking to incorporate a for loop to find the max value (DISCHARGE) associated with each unique value (MONTH). I don't really want to use the 'find' command over and over for each successive value of MONTH column, Thanks for helping

Best Answer

Indeed using find would be madness. For the record, find is over used by beginners and is rarely needed. For that matters, for loop are also overused and are also not needed in this case.
There are many ways to do this:
Using groupsummary:
maxdischarge = groupsummary(yourmatrix(:, 4), yourmatrix(:, 2), 'max');
Using splitapply:
[group, month] = findgroups(yourmatrix(:, 2));  %may not be needed if the month column is integers from 1 to 12
maxdischarge = splitapply(@max, yourmatrix(:, 4), group);  %maxdischarge(i) corresponds to month(i)
Using old fashioned accumarray:
[month, ~, group] = unique(yourmatrix(:, 2));  %works like findgroups, with different order of output. Again may not be needed
maxdischarge = accumarray(yourmatrix(:, 4), group, [], @max);
Or even using a loop:
maxdischarge = zeros(12, 1)
for month = 1:12
    maxdischarge = max(yourmatrix(yourmatrix(:, 2) == month, 4));
end
Note that I would recommend that you convert your matrix into a table:
t = array2table(yourmatrix, 'VariableNames', {'Day', 'Month', 'Year', 'Discharge'});
In which case, you definitively should use groupsummary:
groupsummary(t, 'Month', 'max', 'Discharge');  %calculate max of discharge grouped by month
Even better would be to convert the first 3 columns into a datetime array:
t = table(datetime(yourmatrix(:, 3), yourmatrix(:, 2), yourmatrix(:, 1)), yourmatrix(:, 4), 'VariableNames', {'Date', 'Discharge'});
groupsummary(t, 'Date', 'monthofyear', 'max', 'Discharge')
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