MATLAB Programming Fundamentals - MathWorks

Advantages of Using Tables

Conveniently Store Mixed-Type Data in Single Container

You can use the table data type to collect mixed-type data and metadata properties, such

as variable name, row names, descriptions, and variable units, in a single container.

Tables are suitable for column-oriented or tabular data that is often stored as columns in

a text file or in a spreadsheet. For example, you can use a table to store experimental

data, with rows representing different observations and columns representing different

measured variables.

Tables consist of rows and column-oriented variables. Each variable in a table can have a

different data type and a different size, but each variable must have the same number of

rows.

For example, load sample patients data.

load patients

Then, combine the workspace variables, Systolic and Diastolic into a single

BloodPressure variable and convert the workspace variable, Gender, from a cell array

of character vectors to a categorical array.

BloodPressure = [Systolic Diastolic];

Gender = categorical(Gender);

whos('Gender','Age','Smoker','BloodPressure')

Name Size Bytes Class Attributes

Age 100x1 800 double

BloodPressure 100x2 1600 double

Gender 100x1 346 categorical

Smoker 100x1 100 logical

The variables Age, BloodPressure, Gender, and Smoker have varying data types and

are candidates to store in a table since they all have the same number of rows, 100.

Now, create a table from the variables and display the first five rows.

T = table(Gender,Age,Smoker,BloodPressure);

T(1:5,:)

9 Tables