Data Structures in MATLAB

Hello, I hope this is an appropriate question to ask in here.

As part of continous learning, I took a course on ordered/unordered data structures and I will present the key points to my co-workers (different types of data structures, use cases, etc).

We mostly use MATLAB, so I was looking for pointers to make my presentation more appropriate.

As far as I know:

arrays/vectors are represented by MATLAB matrices

stacks/queues would also be represented by MATLAB matrices

lists - do they have a native representation?

hash tables (unordered maps) are represented by Containers.Map

binary trees (binary searcht trees, red-black trees, ordered maps/sets/dicts) - do they have a native representation?

min/max-heap - do they have a native representation?

graphs - I suppose it makes sense to manually implement graphs.

Conversely:

cell arrays - what are they / how are they implemented?

tables - what are they / how are they implemented?

I know this is a bit of a "theoretical" question but I would be very grateful to get some answers or be pointed towards documentation as I would not like to present erroneous information.

Answer 1

[Bharat Chandra Mukkavalli]

Hi,

To answer your query,

1) MATLAB does not have a "list" data class.

2) Trees are present in MATLAB in the "NTREE" class, the documentation can be found here: https://in.mathworks.com/help/wavelet/ref/ntree.html

3) Heaps Class is present in MATLAB and internally I believe max-heap is implemented, the implementation can be found here: https://in.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/34218-heap

4) MATLAB has the "graph" class to implement the graph data structure, the documentation can be found here: https://in.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/graph.html

5) Here is the documentation of Cell Arrays in MATLAB: https://in.mathworks.com/help/matlab/cell-arrays.html?s_tid=CRUX_topnav

6) Here is the documentation of Tables in MATLAB: https://in.mathworks.com/help/matlab/tables.html

Hope this helps!

[Erik Johannes Loo]

Thanks, I asked this same question in reddit a while back and it seems few people actually know the existence of trees, heaps and graphs in MATLAB (myself included).