Question

In GNU Octave, I want to be able to remove specific columns from a matrix. In the interest of generality. I also want to be able to remove specific rows from a matrix.

Suppose I have this:

mymatrix = eye(5)

mymatrix =

Diagonal Matrix

   1   0   0   0   0
   0   1   0   0   0
   0   0   1   0   0
   0   0   0   1   0
   0   0   0   0   1

I want to remove columns 2 and 4, but when I remove column 2, the position of column 4 has moved to column 3, and that makes my head hurt. There has to be a better way!

Answer 1

GNU Octave delete Columns 2 and 4 from a Matrix

mymatrix = eye(5); 
mymatrix(:,[2,4]) = []; 
disp(mymatrix)

Prints:

1   0   0
0   0   0
0   1   0
0   0   0
0   0   1

GNU Octave delete Rows 2 and 4 from a Matrix:

mymatrix = eye(5); 
mymatrix([2,4],:) = [];
disp(mymatrix) 

Prints:

1   0   0   0   0
0   0   1   0   0
0   0   0   0   1

Time complexity

GNU Octave’s CPU complexity for slicing and broadcasting here is a fast linear time O(n * c) where n is number of rows and c a constant number of rows that remain. It’s C level single-core vectorized but not parallel.

Memory complexity

Working memory complexity is linear: O(n * 2) C makes a clone of the two objects, iterates over every element, then deletes the original.

The only time speed will be a problem is if your matrices are unrealistically wide, tall, or have a number of dimensions that blow out your fast memory, and speed is limited by the transfer speed between disk and memory.