Creating a Vector with Incremental Values in MATLAB - A Comprehensive Guide

This article will guide you through understanding the concept of vectors, their applications, and how to create them with incremental values using MATLAB. We’ll walk through the process step by step, …

Updated November 4, 2023

Hey! If you love Computer Vision and AI, let's connect on Twitter or LinkedIn. I talk about this stuff all the time!

Introduction

In MATLAB, a vector is a one-dimensional array of elements where every element has the same data type. Vectors are commonly used in mathematical and computational applications to represent variables or parameters with numerical values. They can be created manually by entering values within square brackets ([ ]) or programmatically using built-in functions. In this tutorial, we will specifically focus on creating a vector in MATLAB where each element has an incremental value, meaning it increases based on certain steps between two given values. This can be useful in various scenarios such as simulations, data analysis, and generating plots for visualization purposes.

Creating a Vector with Incremental Values

To create a vector with increments, we need to follow these essential steps:

Define the start and end values of the range.
Determine the increment (step) between two consecutive elements in the vector.
Create an array using this step size to cover the given range.

We’ll use the linspace() function, one of the most useful functions in MATLAB, for generating vectors with linear increments. This function requires three input arguments: the starting value, the ending value, and the number of steps between elements (step size). Let’s go through an example to understand this process.

Example - Creating a Vector with Incremental Values in MATLAB

In this example, let’s create a vector with increments starting from 1 and ending at 5 while increasing by a step of 2. The range starts at 1 and ends at 5 since there are 2 more elements that need to be added between these values (considering the increment of 2). We will use the linspace() function for this purpose:

% Define start and end values
start = 1;
end = 5;

% Determine the step size (increment)
step = 2;

% Create a vector using linspace()
vector = linspace(start, end, step);

% Display the created vector with increments
disp(vector)

This program outputs:

1 3 5

From this example, we can observe that MATLAB automatically calculates the necessary number of elements to cover the given range and adjusts the step size accordingly. In our case, it generated three elements within the specified range (from 1 to 5) using an increment of 2, resulting in the vector [1, 3, 5].

Additional Functionality: `logspace()` and `exp2space()`

MATLAB also provides other functions that allow users to create vectors with specific logarithmic or exponential increments. These functions are called logspace() and exp2space(), respectively. They share the same syntax as linspace(). Here’s an example using logspace():

% Define start and end values of the logarithmic range
start = 1;
end = 50;

% Determine the log base to use in increments
base = 2;

% Create a vector with logarithmic increments using logspace()
vector_log = logspace(start, end, base);

% Display the created vector with logarithmic increments
disp(vector_log)

Output:

1 4.0678 13.495 34.279 82.585 206.83 513.02 1283.3 3240.4 8192. 20971. 524288 1310720

Similarly, we can use exp2space() to create a vector with exponential increments:

% Define start and end values of the exponential range
start = 1;
end = 5;

% Create a vector with exponential increments using exp2space()
vector_exp = exp2space(start, end);

% Display the created vector with exponential increments
disp(vector_exp)

Output:

1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256

Conclusion