Generating Combinations

Analyzing combinations comes up frequently in all sorts of analyses, and here you’ll dive into generating three types of combinations in Matlab and complete the first module of our logistics data analysis (next chapter):

• Unordered combinations with replacement;
• Unordered combinations without replacement.

Ordered permutations Matlab has many safety features built in to prevent it from ever harming your computer, but you can still run code that will take forever to finish! In these cases, instead of shutting Matlab down, you can simply hit:

• ctrl + c;
• cmd + c.

to stop code in progress.

Task

The number of ways of forming unordered combinations (with replacement) of m elements from a larger set of n elements is given by the formula: nm.

(i.e.n, choices for each element in the combination, multiplied together m times to get the total number of possibilities).

The average sentence contains between 15-20 words. Let’s consider 2 sentences, each with 20 words.