how to find the largest element if you have an EXTREMELY large data array?

I have a data array contains 195110 elements. Matlab reminds me the data set is too large that I cannot use the max() to find the largest element. PS: The only way I can think of is to paste it to excel and find the largest element. But for too many data sets, manually doing this becomes impossible. Please help! Thanks!

Answer 1

[Sean de Wolski]

Ahhh!

It has nothing to do with size, it has to do with comma separated expansion

When you run:

cluster_tot{:,3}

It extracts every cell in that column. Each cell is then passed into max() as it's own variable. So for example:

x = num2cell(rand(5,1))
max(x{:})

Is equivalent to

max(x{1},x{2},x{3},x{4},x{5})

Max doesn't work like this. If the cells are all the same size, you should be able to horizontally or vertically concatenate them in order to take the max:

max([cluster_tot{:,3}])

Which would first combine them into one input and then take the max of it.

If they're not the same size, you'll need to use cellfun first.

max(cellfun(@(x)max(x(:)),cluster_tot(:,3)))

Note the use of () instead of {} because I want cellfun to operate on the cells not the contents in them.

[congcong]

Thank you so much! I appreciate!!