How to create a Matrix which shows a ranking of values

Hey guys,

sorry for this bad title but i didnt know how to express this differently.

I currently have a vector of 19 names (e.g. Lisa, Paul, Franz, Lisa,...). Some names appear more often than one time. From this vector I Need a Code that gives me a table. One column of this table should show how many times a Name appears and in the other row you can see the Name. This table should be in a descending order.

It should look like:

Count (Column 1) II Name (Column 2)

• 7 II Lisa
• 4 II Paul
• 2 II Michael
• ...

Can anyone of you help me to write this Code? Would really appreciate your help :)

Best Florian

Answer 1

[the cyclist]

Here is one way:

% Name list
names = {'Jim','Bob','Bob','Joe','Lisa','Lisa','Joe','Lisa'};

% Tabulate
tbl = tabulate(names);

% Sort
[~,sortingIndex] = sort([tbl{:,2}],'descend');
tbl = tbl(sortingIndex,:)

[the cyclist]

I should mention that the tabulate function is part of the Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox, not core MATLAB.

Answer 2

[Matt J]

One way,

    >> names={'Lisa','Paul','Lisa','Jane','Lisa','Jane','Robert'};
    >> [col2,i,j]=unique(names);
    >> col1=histcounts(j);
    >> table(col1(:),col2(:),'VariableNames',{'Count','Name'})

    ans = 

        Count      Name  
        _____    ________

        2        'Jane'  
        3        'Lisa'  
        1        'Paul'  
        1        'Robert'

Answer 3

[Geoff Hayes]

Florian - suppose your list of names is a cell array

 listOfNames = {'Lisa', 'Paul', 'Franz', 'Lisa', 'Lisa', 'Michael', 'Paul'};

Using the unique function, you can get the unique names from the list as

 uniqueNames = unique(listOfNames);

Now, use cellfun to apply an anonymous function to each unique name. The anonymous function will count each occurrence of the unique name in listOfNames, and cellfun will return a list of the counts for each.

 nameOccurences = cellfun(@(x)sum(strcmp(listOfNames,x)), uniqueNames);

So all you need to do is to concatenate the occurrence/counts for each names and sort in descending order. First, do the sort on the nameOccurrences numeric array to get the sorted array and (more importantly) the indices of the sorted elements

 [sortedData,I] = sort(nameOccurences,'descend');

Now, use the indices I to create your matrix of "ranked" values

 rankedNames = [num2cell(nameOccurences(I)') uniqueNames(I)'];

which gives

 rankedNames = 
    [3]    'Lisa'   
    [2]    'Paul'   
    [1]    'Franz'  
    [1]    'Michael'