Question

I have something like the following:

a =

 5     1     4
 2     1     1
 5     2     8

I am looking to return the minimum value of the third row

b = min(a(3,:));

b =

 2

How would I be able to return the entire column (i.e. (1;1;2)) and then subtract remove that column from the matrix?

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

If you want to subtract the column with the minimum value from the whole matrix (as was initially asked) use bsxfun like so:

[v, i] = min(a(3,:));
a = bsxfun(@minus, a, a(:, i));

UPDATE:
You can extract and eliminate the column from a like so:

[v, i] = min(a(3,:));
col = a(:, i);
a(:, i) = [];