A question about matrix manipulation - arrays

Question

Given a 1*N matrix or an array, how do I find the first 4 elements which have the same value and then store the index for those elements?
PS:
I'm just curious. What if we want to find the first 4 elements whose value differences are within a certain range, say below 2? For example, M=[10,15,14.5,9,15.1,8.5,15.5,9.5], the elements I'm looking for will be 15,14.5,15.1,15.5 and the indices will be 2,3,5,7.

Answer 1

If you want the first value present 4 times in the array 'tab' in Matlab, you can use
num_min = 4
val=NaN;
for i = tab
if sum(tab==i) >= num_min
val = i;
break
end
end
ind = find(tab==val, num_min);
By instance with
tab = [2 4 4 5 4 6 4 5 5 4 6 9 5 5]
you get
val =
4
ind =
2 3 5 7

Answer 2

Here is my MATLAB solution:
array = randi(5, [1 10]); %# random array of integers
n = unique(array)'; %'# unique elements
[r,~] = find(cumsum(bsxfun(#eq,array,n),2) == 4, 1, 'first');
if isempty(r)
val = []; ind = []; %# no answer
else
val = n(r); %# the value found
ind = find(array == val, 4); %# indices of elements corresponding to val
end
Example:
array =
1 5 3 3 1 5 4 2 3 3
val =
3
ind =
3 4 9 10
Explanation:
First of all, we extract the list of unique elements. In the example used above, we have:
n =
1
2
3
4
5
Then using the BSXFUN function, we compare each unique value against the entire vector array we have. This is equivalent to the following:
result = zeros(length(n),length(array));
for i=1:length(n)
result(i,:) = (array == n(i)); %# row-by-row
end
Continuing with the same example we get:
result =
1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0
0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0
0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
Next we call CUMSUM on the result matrix to compute the cumulative sum along the rows. Each row will give us how many times the element in question appeared so far:
>> cumsum(result,2)
ans =
1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1
0 0 1 2 2 2 2 2 3 4
0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1
0 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2
Then we compare that against four cumsum(result,2)==4 (since we want the location where an element appeared for the forth time):
>> cumsum(result,2)==4
ans =
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Finally we call FIND to look for the first appearing 1 according to a column-wise order: if we traverse the matrix from the previous step column-by-column, then the row of the first appearing 1 indicates the index of the element we are looking for. In this case, it was the third row (r=3), thus the third element in the unique vector is the answer val = n(r). Note that if we had multiple elements repeated 4 times or more in the original array, then the one first appearing for the forth time will show up first as a 1 going column-by-column in the above expression.
Finding the indices of the corresponding answer value is a simple call to FIND...

Answer 3

Here is C++ code
std::map<int,std::vector<int> > dict;
std::vector<int> ans(4);//here we will store indexes
bool noanswer=true;
//my_vector is a vector, which we must analize
for(int i=0;i<my_vector.size();++i)
{
std::vector<int> &temp = dict[my_vector[i]];
temp.push_back(i);
if(temp.size()==4)//we find ans
{
std::copy(temp.begin(),temp.end(),ans.begin() );
noanswer = false;
break;
}
}
if(noanswer)
std::cout<<"No Answer!"<<std::endl;

Answer 4

Ignore this and use Amro's mighty solution . . .
Here is how I'd do it in Matlab. The matrix can be any size and contain any range of values and this should work. This solution will automatically find a value and then the indicies of the first 4 elements without being fed the search value a priori.
tab = [2 5 4 5 4 6 4 5 5 4 6 9 5 5]
%this is a loop to find the indicies of groups of 4 identical elements
tot = zeros(size(tab));
for nn = 1:numel(tab)
idxs=find(tab == tab(nn), 4, 'first');
if numel(idxs)<4
tot(nn) = Inf;
else
tot(nn) = sum(idxs);
end
end
%find the first 4 identical
bestTot = find(tot == min(tot), 1, 'first' );
%store the indicies you are interested in.
indiciesOfInterst = find(tab == tab(bestTot), 4, 'first')

Answer 5

Since I couldn't easily understand some of the solutions, I made that one:
l = 10; m = 5; array = randi(m, [1 l])
A = zeros(l,m); % m is the maximum value (may) in array
A(sub2ind([l,m],1:l,array)) = 1;
s = sum(A,1);
b = find(s(array) == 4,1);
% now in b is the index of the first element
if (~isempty(b))
find(array == array(b))
else
disp('nothing found');
end
I find this easier to visualize. It fills '1' in all places of a square matrix, where values in array exist - according to their position (row) and value (column). This is than summed up easily and mapped to the original array. Drawback: if array contains very large values, A may get relative large too.

Answer 6

You're PS question is more complicated. I didn't have time to check each case but the idea is here :
M=[10,15,14.5,9,15.1,8.5,15.5,9.5]
val = NaN;
num_min = 4;
delta = 2;
[Ms, iMs] = sort(M);
dMs = diff(Ms);
ind_min=Inf;
n = 0;
for i = 1:length(dMs)
if dMs(i) <= delta
n=n+1;
else
n=0;
end
if n == (num_min-1)
if (iMs(i) < ind_min)
ind_min = iMs(i);
end
end
end
ind = sort(iMs(ind_min + (0:num_min-1)))
val = M(ind)