How to find the first instance of a pattern in a cell array?

I have a sublist of patterns:

pattern = {{1 1 1}, {4 4 4}, {1 1 4}, {1 4 1}};

and a set of data:

data = {0;0;0;0;0;0;1;0;1;1;0;1;4;0;1;1;1;4;0;0;1};

And I want to be able to find the first instance of any one of the possible patterns within the data array. I have thought about converting all instances of 4 to 1 and do something simple like:

count = 0;
indx = {};
for ii = 1:length(data)
        if data{ii} == 1
            count = count + 1;
            indx{count} = ii;
        else
            count = 0;
        end

          if count == 3
              break
          end
end
first_instance = indx{1};

But I was wondering if there was something that was more elegant and didn't require data conversion. Maybe a moving window to match patterns?

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

Storing lots of scalar intgers in a cell array is quite inefficient, so the first thing to do would be to store that data in a simple numeric array. Then the task is simpler:

>> data = [0;0;0;0;0;0;1;0;1;1;0;1;4;0;1;1;1;4;0;0;1];
>> pattern = {[1,1,1], [4,4,4], [1,1,4], [1,4,1]};
>> C = cellfun(@(s)strfind(char(data'),char(s)),pattern,'uni',0);
>> C{:}
ans =  15
ans = []
ans =  16
ans = []
>> min([C{:}])
ans =  15

Answer 2

[Jos (10584)]

It would be much easier if you store this as regular arrays, rather then cell arrays of scalar cells. You can use strfind if all the values are integers => 0. Example:

pattern = {[1 1 1], [4 4 4], [1 1 4], [1 4 1]} 
data = [0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 4 0 1 1 1 4 0 0 1] 
sfix = cellfun(@(x) min([strfind(data, x) Inf]), pattern) 
[p, ix] = min(sfix) % p = position in data, ix = which pattern

Answer 3

[Joshua Williams]

Both of these worked great! Thank you.