Writing MATLAB Scripts

Last updated on 2023-12-08 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 35 minutes

Overview

Questions

How can I save and re-use my programs?

Objectives

Write and save MATLAB scripts.
Save MATLAB plots to disk.
Document our scripts for future reference.

In the previous episode we started talking about scripts. A MATLAB script is just a text file with a .m extension, and we found that they let us save and run several commands in one go.

In this episode we will revisit the scripts in a bit more depth, and will recap some of the concepts we’ve learned so far.

We’ve written commands to load data from a .csv file, compute statistics from the data and plot the data in some figures. Let’s put those commands in a script called patient_analysis.m, which we’ll save in the src directory in our current folder, matlab-novice-inflammation.

To create a new script we can click the “New script” button on the top left, or use the command:

MATLAB

>> edit src/patient_analysis.m

Matlab will create a file called patient_analysis.m in the src folder. It is important that we let MATLAB know that we want it to find stuff in this folder. To do this, right click on the folder icon in the file browser and select “Add to Path”.

The MATLAB path

MATLAB knows about files in the current directory, but if we want to run a script saved in a different location, we need to make sure that this file is visible to MATLAB. We do this by adding directories to the MATLAB path. The path is a list of directories MATLAB will search through to locate files.

To add a directory to the MATLAB path, we go to the Home tab, click on Set Path, and then on Add with Subfolders.... We navigate to the directory and add it to the path to tell MATLAB where to look for our files. When you refer to a file (either code or data), MATLAB will search all the directories in the path to find it. Alternatively, for data files, we can provide the relative or absolute file path.

We can now type the contents of the script:

MATLAB

% Load patient data
patient_data = readmatrix("data/base/inflammation-01.csv");

% Compute global statistics
g_mean = mean(patient_data(:));
g_max = max(patient_data(:));
g_min = min(patient_data(:));

% Compute patient statistics
p_mean = mean(patient_data(5,:));
p_max = max(patient_data(5,:));
p_min = min(patient_data(5,:));

% Compare patient vs global
disp("Patient 5:")
disp("High mean?")
disp(p_mean > g_mean)
disp("Highest max?")
disp(p_max == g_max)
disp("Lowest min?")
disp(p_min == g_min)

Comments

You might have noticed that we described what we want our code to do in lines starting with the percent sign: %. This is another plus of writing scripts: you can comment your code to make it easier to understand when you come back to it after a while.

Now, before running this script lets clear our workplace so that we can see what is happening.

MATLAB

>> clear
>> clc

If you now run the script by clicking “Run” on the graphical user interface, pressing F5 on the keyboard, or typing the script’s name patient_analysis on the command line (the file name without the extension), you’ll see a bunch of variables appear in the workspace and this output:

MATLAB

>> patient_analysis

OUTPUT

Patient 5:
High mean?
   0
Highest max?
   0
Lowest min?
   1

Remember, we supressed most outputs with ;, so the only lines printed are the ones with disp.

As you can see, the script ran every line of code in the script in order, and created any variable we asked for. Having the code in the script makes it much easier to follow what we are doing, and also make changes. For example, if we now want to look at patient 8, all we need to do is change the number in lines 10, 11 and 12. We can actually do a bit better, and replace that number with a variable patient_number.

This variable needs to exist before it is used, so lets insert it before computing the patient statistics, like so:

MATLAB

% Load patient data
patient_data = readmatrix("data/base/inflammation-01.csv");

% Compute global statistics
g_mean = mean(patient_data(:));
g_max = max(patient_data(:));
g_min = min(patient_data(:));

% Compute patient statistics
patient_number = 8;
p_mean = mean(patient_data(patient_number,:));
p_max = max(patient_data(patient_number,:));
p_min = min(patient_data(patient_number,:));

% Compare patient vs global
disp("Patient:")
disp(patient_number)
disp("High mean?")
disp(p_mean > g_mean)
disp("Highest max?")
disp(p_max == g_max)
disp("Lowest min?")
disp(p_min == g_min)

Note that we also changed the disp commands to show the right patient number.

Getting the results for whichever patient is now as simple as changing the value of patient_number.

For the case of patient 8, we get:

MATLAB

>> patient_analysis

OUTPUT

Patient:
   8
High mean?
   1
Highest max?
   0
Lowest min?
   1

Help text

A comment can appear on any line, but be aware that the first line or block of comments in a script or function is used by MATLAB as the help text. When we use the help command, MATLAB returns the help text. The first help text line (known as the H1 line) typically includes the name of the program, and a brief description. The help command works in just the same way for our own programs as for built-in MATLAB functions. You should write help text for all of your own scripts and functions.

Let’s write an H1 line at the top of our script:

MATLAB

% PATIENT_ANALYSIS   Computes mean, max and min of a patient and compares to global statistics.

We can then get help for our script by running

MATLAB

>> help patient_analysis

OUTPUT

  patient_analysis   Computes mean, max and min of a patient and compares to global statistics.

Script for plotting

You should already have a script from the previous lesson that plots the mean, max and min using a tiled layout. We will replicate that script, but add comments to make it easier to understand.

Create a new script in the current directory called plot_daily_average.m

MATLAB

>> edit src/plot_daily_average.m

In the script, lets recap what we need to do:

MATLAB

% PLOT_DAILY_AVERAGE   Plots daily average, max and min inflammation accross patients.

% Load patient data
patient_data = readmatrix("data/base/inflammation-01.csv");

fig = figure;

% Define tiled layout and labels
tlo = tiledlayout(1,3);
xlabel(tlo,"Day of trial")
ylabel(tlo,"Inflammation")

% Plot average inflammation per day
nexttile
plot(mean(patient_data, 1))
title("Average")

% Plot max inflammation per day
nexttile
plot(max(patient_data, [], 1))
title("Max")

% Plot min inflammation per day
nexttile
plot(min(patient_data, [], 1))
title("Min")

Note that we are explicitly creating a new figure window using the figure command.

Try this on the command line:

MATLAB

>> figure

MATLAB’s plotting commands only create a new figure window if one doesn’t already exist: the default behaviour is to reuse the current figure window as we saw in the previous episode. Explicitly creating a new figure window in the script avoids any unexpected results from plotting on top of existing figures.

Now lets run the script:

MATLAB

>> plot_daily_average

You should see the figure appear.

Try running plot_daily_average again without closing the first figure to see that it does not plot on top of the previous figure A second figure is created. If you look carefully, at the top it is labelled as “Figure 2”.

It is worth mentioning that it is possible to close all the currently open figures with close all.

Saving figures

We can ask MATLAB to save the image too using the saveas command. In order to maintain an organised project we’ll save the images in the results directory:

MATLAB

% Save plot in "results" folder as png image:
saveas(fig,"results/daily_average_01.png")

Getting the current figure

In the script we saved our figure as a variable fig. This is very useful because we can pass it as a reference, for example, for the saveas function. If we had not done that, we would need to pass the “current figure”. You can get the current figure with gcf, like so:

MATLAB

% Save plot in "results" folder as png image:
saveas(gcf,"results/daily_average_01.png")

You can also use gcf to test you are on the right figure, for example with

MATLAB

gcf == fig

Hiding figures

When saving plots to disk, it’s sometimes useful to turn off their visibility as MATLAB plots them. For example, we might not want to view (or spend time closing) the figures in MATLAB, and not displaying the figures could make the script run faster.

Let’s add a couple of lines of code to do this.

We can ask MATLAB to create an empty figure window without displaying it by setting its Visible property to 'off'. We can do this by passing the option as an argument to the figure creation: figure(Visible='off')

When we do this, we have to be careful to manually “close” the figure after we are doing plotting on it - the same as we would “close” an actual figure window if it were open. We can do so with the command close

Adding these two lines, our finished script looks like this:

MATLAB

% PLOT_DAILY_AVERAGE   Saves plot of daily average, max and min inflammation accross patients.

% Load patient data
patient_data = readmatrix("data/base/inflammation-01.csv");

fig = figure(Visible='off');

% Define tiled layout and labels
tlo = tiledlayout(1,3);
xlabel(tlo,"Day of trial")
ylabel(tlo,"Inflammation")

% Plot average inflammation per day
nexttile
plot(mean(patient_data, 1))
title("Average")

% Plot max inflammation per day
nexttile
plot(max(patient_data, [], 1))
title("Max")

% Plot min inflammation per day
nexttile
plot(min(patient_data, [], 1))
title("Min")

% Save plot in "results" folder as png image:
saveas(fig,"results/daily_average_01.png")

close(fig)

The scripts we’ve written make regenerating plots easier, and looking at individual patient’s data much simpler, but we still need to open the script, change the patient number, save, and run. In contrast, when we have used functions we can provide arguments, which are then used to do something. So, can we create our own functions?

Key Points

Save MATLAB code in files with a .m suffix.
The set of commands in a script get executed by calling the script by its name, and all variables are saved to the workspace. Be careful, this potentially replaces variables.
Comment your code to make it easier to understand using % at the start of a line.
The first line of any script or function (known as the H1 line) should be a comment. It typically includes the name of the program, and a brief description.
You can use help script_name to get the information in the H1 line.
Create new figures with figure, or new ‘invisible’ figures with figure(visible=‘off’). Remember to close them with close(), or close all.
Save figures with saveas(fig,"results/my_plot_name.png"), where fig is the figure you want to save, and can be replaced with gcf if you want to save the current figure.