MATLAB: How to find minimal distance between elements

forminimumvector

I have a vector, and I would like to find the minimal distance between element values. Any element distance from any element in the set. Is it possible to do this without a for cycle?

Best Answer

Let your vector be called v. Then do this:

d = min(diff(sort(v)));

This finds the minimum distance between any two elements of v, but it does not show the points in v where that occurs. To do that requires the use of the index returned as a second output of the 'sort' function as well as an index from the 'min' function. Let us know if that is what you want.

Related Solutions

MATLAB: Find the Euclidean distance

sqrt((x2-x1).^2 + (y2-y1).^2)

MATLAB: Finding Minimum Distance between two points

You don't need pdist2() because you aren't asking for the distance of every point to every other point. You're only asking for the distance from every point to the single point at (0, 0). So you can simply use sqrt()! Try this:

% Create 10 random points.
xy = rand(10, 2);
x = xy(:, 1);
y = xy(:, 2);
plot(x, y, 'bo', 'MarkerSize', 10);
grid on;
% Compute the distance of each of those points from (0, 0)
distances = sqrt(xy(: , 1) .^ 2 + xy(:, 2) .^ 2)
% Find the closest one.
[minDistance, indexOfMin] = min(distances);
closestX = x(indexOfMin);
closestY = y(indexOfMin);
% Mark it with red *
hold on; % Don't blow away existing points.
plot(closestX, closestY, 'r*', 'MarkerSize', 8, 'LineWidth', 2);
% Draw a line from the closest point to (0, 0)
line([0, closestX], [0, closestY], 'LineWidth', 2, 'Color', 'r');

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MATLAB: Find the Euclidean distance

MATLAB: Finding Minimum Distance between two points

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