Question

I have an array which can be any size (in rows) but is always two columns wide. I would like to throw away any rows containing numbers which stray more than 1 from the median of each column.

For example:

array =
 2 5
 3 4
 9 5
 2 8
 3 5
 . .
 . .
 . .
 etc

In the above example, median(array) gives [2 5]. So, for the columns above, I would expect the third and fourth rows to be eliminated, since row three contains 9 in the first column, and row four contains 8 in the second column, both of which are outside of my limit (1 away from the median). Note that I want to throw away BOTH columns if EITHER column contains a number which is not within 1 of the median for that column.

Any help would be greatly appreciated…

Answer 1

I don’t have MATLAB right now, but I think this should work. You should be able to at least follow the logic.

med = median(arrray);
arrayNew = array( ( abs(array(:,1)-med(1))<=1 ) & ( abs(array(:,2)-med(1))<=2 ), : );

What the above code is doing is finding all indices where array value in both columns is at most distance 1 from median of each column. Then it selects only those rows that corresponds to these indices.