Generate a matrix containing all combinations of elements taken from n vectors

Question

This question pops up quite often in one form or another (see for example here or here). So I thought I\'d present it in a general form, and provide an answer which might se

Answer 1

I've done some benchmarking on the two proposed solutions. The benchmarking code is based on the timeit function, and is included at the end of this post.

I consider two cases: three vectors of size n, and three vectors of sizes n/10, n and n*10 respectively (both cases give the same number of combinations). n is varied up to a maximum of 240 (I choose this value to avoid the use of virtual memory in my laptop computer).

The results are given in the following figure. The ndgrid-based solution is seen to consistently take less time than combvec. It's also interesting to note that the time taken by combvec varies a little less regularly in the different-size case.

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Benchmarking code

Function for ndgrid-based solution:

function combs = f1(vectors)
n = numel(vectors); %// number of vectors
combs = cell(1,n); %// pre-define to generate comma-separated list
[combs{end:-1:1}] = ndgrid(vectors{end:-1:1}); %// the reverse order in these two
%// comma-separated lists is needed to produce the rows of the result matrix in
%// lexicographical order
combs = cat(n+1, combs{:}); %// concat the n n-dim arrays along dimension n+1
combs = reshape(combs,[],n);

Function for combvec solution:

function combs = f2(vectors)
combs = combvec(vectors{:}).';

Script to measure time by calling timeit on these functions:

nn = 20:20:240;
t1 = [];
t2 = [];
for n = nn;
    %//vectors = {1:n, 1:n, 1:n};
    vectors = {1:n/10, 1:n, 1:n*10};
    t = timeit(@() f1(vectors));
    t1 = [t1; t];
    t = timeit(@() f2(vectors));
    t2 = [t2; t];
end