MATLAB: How to use a vector as a set of indices

Question

So, I have a 5000×1 vector y, the entries of y are all integer values between 1 and 10.

I want to create a new matrix, yrec, that is 10×5000, such that if y(1)=10 then yrec(10,1)=1, if y(2)=8 then yrec(8,2)=1, if y(3)=4 then yrec(4,3)=1 etc.

and all other entries in that row are equal to zero. I can do this through a for loop quite easily as follows

m=5000;
num_labels=10;
yrec=zeros(num_labels,m); %recoded y
for i=1:m
  yrec(y(i),i)=1; 
end

which works without issue. However, I was wondering if there is a vectorized way to do this? hopefully more computationally efficient than a for loop?

I tried

yrec(y,1:m)=1;

but this just sets every entry in yrec equal to 1 for some reason.

Answer 1

Try this:

m = 5000;
num_labels = 10;
y = randi(num_labels,m,1);
yrec = zeros(num_labels,m);
yrec(sub2ind(size(yrec),y',1:m)) = 1;