Dataset object (mdadata)

By default MATLAB does not provide a possibility to use names for rows and columns (or other dimensions if we are talking about arrays), which leads to a lot of extra code even for some simple actions, e.g. showing a scatter plot with proper axis labels. There are several toolboxes, which tackle the problem by using a specific class for datasets. The mdadata class was created for these purposes.

The mdadata is quite simple in use and it has many arithmetic, mathematical and statistic methods overridden so one can e.g. multiply datasets or calculate statistics for datasets' columns directly, without extracting the dataset values. Besides that the mdadata class overrides standard plotting functions, allowing to create annotated plots easily.

Any data in mdatools (e.g. scores, regression coefficients, etc.) is stored as an mdadata object. Therefore it is a good idea to learn how the mdadata works from the beginning.