Because varfun returns a table, assignment using parenthesis subscripting cannot change the type
of any table variables. For example, this assignment does not convert any variables from the double
to single data type.
housing(:,areaVars) = varfun(@single,housing,"InputVariables",areaVars);
To convert the data types of table variables, use convertvars, as previously shown.
Row Operations on Data in Table
Because curly brace subscripting extracts the variables from a table as one matrix having one data
type, you can use it to perform row operations across numeric variables in a table. For example, a
check on the data is to compare the individual square footage variables against
TotalAboveGroundLivingArea. Extract the former by using curly braces. Then compare their row
sums to TotalAboveGroundLivingArea, extracted by using dot notation.
area = housing{:,["FirstFlrArea" "SecondFlrArea" "LowQualFinishedArea"]}
area = 2928×3
1656
0
0
896
0
0
1329
0
0
2110
0
0
928
701
0
926
678
0
1338
0
0
1280
0
0
1616
0
0
1028
776
0
⋮
isequal(sum(area,2), housing.TotalAboveGroundLivingArea)
ans = logical
1
The square footage data is consistent. Another example is to compute the total number of bathrooms
in each house by extracting the four different bathroom counts and adding them up across each row.
bathCountVars = ["BsmtHalfBath" "HalfBath" "BsmtFullBath" "FullBath"];
bathCounts = housing{:,bathCountVars}
bathCounts = 2928×4
0
0
1
1
0
0
0
1
0
1
0
1
0
1
1
2
0
1
0
2
0
1
0
2
0
0
1
2
0
0
0
2
0
0
1
2
0
1
0
2
⋮
9 Tables
9-82