How to make a loop that writes in a new vector only values that meet a condition?

I'm trying to make some kind of data filter that goes through a vector, compares every value with the previous one and writes the value in a new vector only if it is bigger than the previous one.

VPo=[0 0 0 0 1 0 2 3 4 0 5 4 3 0 2 1 0 0 0 0];

I wrote this simple loop:

[row, column]=find (VPo == max(VPo));

for i=2:row
    if VPo (i,1) >= VPo (i-1,1)
       VPoF(i) = VPo(i,1);   
    end
end

The problem is that it writes all the values from VPo to VPoF until max(VPo) and doesn't do anything:

VPoF = VPo=[0 0 0 0 1 0 2 3 4 0 5];

Answer 1

[James Tursa]

Assuming you don't want the first value since there is no previous value to compare to:

x = [false, diff(VPo) > 0];
VPoF = VPo(x);

If you do want that first value, change the false to true.

[Tsvetan Yorov]

I am not very sure what that did but it worked out ;}

[James Tursa]

The diff( ) function calculates the difference between successive elements. The expression above simply looks for when this is positive (indicating the value increased) as a logical result. Then this is used as a logical index into VPo to extract your result.

[Tsvetan Yorov]

Thank you for the detailed explanation! It makes sense now.