MATLAB: How can one “summarize a matrix with the first four columns”

MATLAB

First, I have a matrix like
1 2 3 4 1.1
1 2 3 4 3
1 2 3 5 4
2 3 4 1 6
...
Second, what I would like to do is to summarize the matrix with the first four columns. That is, here, I want to take an average of the entries of the fifth item for the rows that has the same first four columns. In this example, it will be
1 2 3 4 2.05
1 2 3 5 4
2 3 4 1 6
...
Please advise.

Best Answer

Here is one way to do it. There might be some clever way to fully vectorize (eliminate the loop) this, but this will work if performance on huge arrays isn't an issue
% define your original matrix 
A = [1 2 3 4 1.1;1 2 3 4 3; 1 2 3 5 4; 2 3 4 1 6]
% find rows with unique first four elements
 [C,~,ic] = unique(A(:,1:4),'rows')
 
 % summarize by finding average of elements in fifth column over rows with
 % same first four columns
 
 for k = 1:length(ia)
     % use logical indexing to find rows with unique first four elements
     C(k,5) = mean(A(ic==k,5))
 end
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