How to: simplify statistical commands into fewer lines of code

I have an excel spreadsheet with data of different categories and am trying to find the mean, median, maximum, minimum, and standard deviation values for each category by creating a matrix for each one. (each category corresponds to its own column of data in the spreadsheet). Then I will put the data into one large matrix. So far I have coded below for the mean:

    mean_matrix = [ mean2(population) 
                    mean2(aveincome) 
                    mean2(birthrate) 
                    mean2(deathrate) 
                    mean2(emprate)  
                    mean2(familysize) ];

I was going to do the same to create the matrices for the median, min, max, and std, and eventually create the summary matrix by coding:

    summary = [mean_matrix, median_matrix, min_matrix, max_matrix, std_matrix];

However I realized that the above would span over fifteen lines of code. Is there a way in which I can simplify my code in order to take the mean, etc. more effectively? Should I use cell numbers in the excel spreadsheet somehow?

Answer 1

[Sean de Wolski]

Instead of creating a matrix for each one, create a table ( readtable is the function to bring it in from Excel). Now you can use summary, grpstats or varfun to get the statistics all in one line:

T = table(rand(10,1),rand(10,2),'VariableNames',{'test1','test2'})
varfun(@mean2,T)

[per isakson]

See summary, Print summary of table or categorical array

Answer 2

[dpb]

... [compute] mean, median, maximum, minimum, and standard deviation values for each category [in which each[ corresponds to its own column of data in the spreadsheet).

Then just read the array and operate on it...

data=xlsread('yourspreadsheet');  % read/return the numeric data
summary=[mean(x); median(x); min(x); max(x); std(x)];

That's the power of Matlab; it operates on arrays automagically.