Using Convolution to Smooth Data with a Moving Average in MATLAB

(Originally posted on Doug's MATLAB Video Tutorials blog.)

I teach the introduction to MATLAB classes for all new hires in the Technical Support group at MathWorks. One of the attendees wanted to know how to do a moving average in MATLAB. This can be useful for filtering, or smoothing, noisy data. I realized I had never covered that on the blog, so here we go! I show how to do this from scratch using conv. If you have the Curve Fitting Toolbox, you might want to check out smooth, which adds some fancier smoothing methods.