Summary of a Table
Summary function does not take any optional argument for tables or timetables therefore, we always get the summary of entire tables. Let us see the same with the help of examples.
First, we will create a table from random vectors and then will print out its summary using the summary() function.
Matlab
% Variables emp_id = [12; 34; 37; 45; 65]; emp_names = { 'Harry' ; 'Sean' ; 'Mark' ; 'Maria' ; 'Mia' }; salaries = [1500; 5400; 2300; 3000; 9000]; % creating table with above variables rec = table(emp_id,emp_names,salaries); |
Output:
>> rec
rec =
5x3 table
emp_id emp_names salaries
______ _________ ________
12 {'Harry'} 1500
34 {'Sean' } 5400
37 {'Mark' } 2300
45 {'Maria'} 3000
65 {'Mia' } 9000
We have created three column vectors above and using them, we created a table named rec. This table would look like this.
Now, we will print the summary of this table by typing the following command in the command space.
Matlab
% printing summary summary(rec) |
Output:
>> summary(rec)
Variables:
emp_id: 5x1 double
Values:
Min 12
Median 37
Max 65
emp_names: 5x1 cell array of character vectors
salaries: 5x1 double
Values:
Min 1500
Median 3000
Max 9000
Here, we can see that for the columns that contain numeric data, summary returns statistical values such as minimum, median, and maximum value whereas for the column that contains only text/character data, it simply return the size of the vector.
Print summary of table, timetable, or categorical array in MATLAB
MATLAB provides various ways to store and organize data such as tables, categorical arrays, arrays, timetables, vectors, etc. MATLAB deals with big data used for machine learning and other mathematical functions which require different organization of data. For small data it is efficient to take a look at the entire data and summarize it but, the same cannot be done when you are working with big data or binary data(.mat files).
For such situations, MATLAB provides the summary function which returns a brief summary of the data structure passed to it. It must be noted here that the summary function works only on three type of MATLAB objects:
- Table
- Timetable
- Categorical Array/Vector
In this article, we shall see how to use the summary function on the above-mentioned MATLAB objects.