Split matrix into several depending on value in Matlab - arrays

Question

I have a cell array that I need to split into several matrices so that I can take the sum of subsets of the data. This is a sample of what I have:
A = {'M00.300', '1644.07';...
'M00.300', '9745.42'; ...
'M00.300', '2232.88'; ...
'M00.600', '13180.82'; ...
'M00.600', '2755.19'; ...
'M00.600', '15800.38'; ...
'M00.900', '18088.11'; ...
'M00.900', '1666.61'};
I want the sum of the second columns for each of 'M00.300', 'M00.600', and 'M00.900'. For example, to correspond to 'M00.300' I would want 1644.07 + 9745.42 + 2232.88.
I don't want to just hard code it because each data set is different, so I need the code to work for different size cell arrays.
I'm not sure of the best way to do this, I was going to begin by looping through A and comparing the strings in the first column and creating matrices within that loop, but that sounded messy and not efficient.
Is there a simpler way to do this?

Answer 1

Classic use of accumarray. You would use the first column as an index and the second column as the values associated with each index. accumarray works where you group values that belong to the same index together and you apply a function to those values. In your case, you'd use the default behaviour and sum things together.
However, you'll need to convert the first column into numeric labels. The third output of unique will help you do this. You'll also need to convert the second column into a numeric array and so str2double is a perfect way to do this.
Without further ado:
[val,~,id] = unique(A(:,1)); %// Get unique values and indices
out = accumarray(id, str2double(A(:,2))); %// Aggregate the groups and sum
format long g; %// For better display of precision
T = table(val, out) %// Display on a nice table
I get this:
>> T = table(val, out)
T =
val out
_________ ________
'M00.300' 13622.37
'M00.600' 31736.39
'M00.900' 19754.72
The above uses the table class that is available from R2013b and onwards. If you don't have this, you can perhaps use a for loop and print out each cell and value separately:
for idx = 1 : numel(out)
fprintf('%s: %f\n', val{idx}, out(idx));
end
We get:
M00.300: 13622.370000
M00.600: 31736.390000
M00.900: 19754.720000