MATLAB is a language and interactive environment for developing algorithms,

analyzing and visualizing data, and performing numerical computation.

You can import data into MATLAB from files, other applications or external devices.

Once your data is in MATLAB, you can explore and analyze it through built-in
engineering and mathematical functions and plots and visualizations.

The MATLAB language supports the vector and matrix operations that are fundamental
to engineering and scientific problems. Commands can be executed one at a time,
providing immediate results. This lets you explore multiple approaches, and iterate to an
optimal solution. You can create scripts and functions to reuse and automate your work.
Development tools allow you to implement your algorithms efficiently and optimize their
performance.

MATLAB provides the features of a traditional programming language as well as layout

tools for designing custom graphical user interfaces.

Add-on toolboxes extend the MATLAB environment to solve problems in a range of

applications, including:

 Signal processing and communications

 Video and image processing
 Control design
 And computational biology
MATLAB provides features for sharing your work.

MATLAB code and results can be automatically published. Algorithms and applications
can be distributed as standalone executables, components for integration in other
software environments, such as Excel, or as portable C code for algorithms using a
subset of the MATLAB language.

Over one million people around the world use MATLAB. By combining a powerful
computational engine and programming environment with interactive tools, MATLAB has
become the language of technical computing.

Analyzing and Visualizing Data with

MATLAB
MATLAB provides tools to acquire, visualize, and analyze data.
®

With MATLAB, you can gain insight into your data in a fraction of the time it would take
using spreadsheets or traditional programming languages.

You can import data into MATLAB from files such as Excel , text, or image files, from
®

databases, and from external devices.

Many files can be imported interactively, such as this mixed numeric and text file.
Here the import tool helps you specify what data you want to bring in as well as the
format of the data.

You can auto-generate MATLAB code to capture the steps required for the import. This
allows you to repeat the process on this or other similar files.

You can also choose to import your data programmatically. File I/O functions let you
work with data files in any format.

Now that your data is in MATLAB, you can use the built-in plotting functions to visualize
and understand your data. Here we plot the data using the Plots tab in the MATLAB
Toolstrip. The plot can be customized interactively using the plot tools. You can also
perform customizations programmatically.

To see the many ways you can display data graphically with MATLAB, you can visit the
MATLAB Plot Gallery where you can view and download examples for a variety of plot
types.

You can also manage, filter, and pre-process your data in MATLAB.

MATLAB provides functions for filtering and smoothing, interpolation, convolution, and
fast Fourier transforms (FFTs). Here we identify all the data that has a value of 999, an
indicator that we have a broken sensor. We use interpolation to replace the missing
temperature values.

Using MATLAB, you can uncover trends, test assumptions, and build descriptive
models.

Add-on products provide capabilities for curve and surface fitting, multivariate statistics,
spectral analysis, image analysis, and many other analysis tasks.

Here we use Curve Fitting Toolbox™ to fit a custom model to our data.

You can document and share results as plots or as complete reports.

You can capture your analysis in a single script or function and generate a report directly
from it. The report will contain your MATLAB code, any comments, as well as the results
from running the program, including plots.

Here we’ve published to an HTML file, but reports can be published in a variety of other
formats, including PDF, Word, or LaTeX.