Question

More of a general MATLAB question than looking for programming advice — if I have:

y = cellfun(@(x)sum(x(:)), Z, 'un', 0);

where there are a combinations of NaN‘s and real numbers in each cell matrix, when I sum all elements of those matrices per cell, will I always get total = NaN because there are NaN‘s in there, or will they be ignored and just sum the real numbers. The reason I ask is because I am getting:

y = [NaN] [NaN] [NaN]
    [NaN] [NaN] [NaN]
    [NaN] [NaN] [NaN]

an example cell matrix (cell element) would be:

x{1,1} = NaN 2   3
         4   5   6
         7   8   9

so I would expect the first element of y to be:

y{1,1} = 44

How am I not getting this?

Answer 1

To ignore the NaNs, just use vector indexing in your anonymous function, by replacing the colon (:)
with ~isnan(x):

@(x)sum(x(~isnan(x)))

So you get:

y = cellfun(@(x)sum(x(~isnan(x))), Z, 'un', 0);