cell2mat loops & running out of memory

Aloha,

I need to process 72 hours of sampling at a rate of 25.6 kHz. The MatLab files I am given have the form of a structure, with string fields containing instrument information, units, etc. The numerical data itself is contained in 262144x2 double fields named StreamSegment000000_000255, StreamSegment000256_000511, and so forth, each of which containing 10.24 seconds of data. The file I am currently working on has roughly 2 hours of data, divided into 703 10.24-second fields of size 262144x2 double and a 2.84-second field of size 72704x2 double (of course, files will have different sizes). The first thing I need to compute is 30-second RMS for all 72 hours. Here is my approach:

S=load('REC0049.mat');
cell0=struct2cell(S);
C=cell0(3:end,:);     % crops out the first 2 arrays of junk information

Now cell2mat(C) will of course lead me "??? Error using ==> cat; Out of memory", so I tried to break down to several matrices.

for i=1:number  
eval(sprintf('M%d = cell2mat(C((1+3*(i-1)):(3*i),:));', i));
end

If number=235, obtaining 235 matrices each containing 3 of these 10.24-second fields would allow me to easily compute 30.72-second rms (close enough) for these 2 hours. Of course, this works just fine for small "numbers", but I quickly encounter "*??? Error using ==> cat Out of memory" again.

I could try nested for-loops and progressively clear out the memory, but I am sure there are solutions that are a lot more elegant and efficient.

Thank you!

Answer 1

[Matt J]

So if I understood you, the fields named StreamSegment000000_000255, StreamSegment000256_000511 are the fields of S when you do

 S=load('REC0049.mat');

In other words, you generated REC0049.mat by using eval to auto-name 703 different variables and saved them to a .mat file? I hope you know that that's a bad idea, as described here.

Instead, you could use MATFILE to write the segments to and from the elements of a cell array C in REC0049.mat.

    C=cell(1,number);
    save REC0049 C;

    matObj = matfile('REC0049.mat','Writable',true);

    for i=1:number*3

      matObj.C(1,i)={data_chunk_to_write};

    end

Then later

      rms=zeros(1,number);
      for i=1:number

        rms(i) = computeRMS( cell2mat(matObj.C(1,  (1+3*(i-1)):(3*i),:) ) )

      end

[Margaux]

Thanks. I did not create the REC0049.mat file. The fields named StreamSegment000000_000255, StreamSegment000256_000511 etc. were generated when I loaded the file (without the S= statement).

Answer 2

[Malcolm Lidierth]

Depending on the MAT-file version, there may be something that could help in:

http://www.mathworks.co.uk/matlabcentral/fileexchange/12250-project-waterloo-file-and-matrix-utilities