The fall release of MATLAB is out, and while most toolbox updates relevant to data mining are minor, MATLAB itself has seen some big changes. From the MATLAB 7.5 Latest Features page, among other things:
Performance and Large Data Set Handling
* MATLAB arrays no longer limited to 2^31 (~2 x 10^9) elements, allowing many numeric and low-level file I/O functions to support real double arrays greater than 16 GB on 64-bit platforms
* New function maxNumCompThreads enabling use of get and set for the maximum number of computational threads
* Upgraded Linear Algebra Package library (LAPACK 3.1) on all platforms, plus upgraded optimized Basic Linear Algebra Subprogram libraries (BLAS) on Intel processors (MKL 9.1) and on AMD processors (AMCL 3.6)
Readers are strongly encouraged to visit the New Features page for more information.
On A Completely Unrelated Subject...
A few months ago, I attended a one-day presentation, offered locally free of charge by the MathWorks. The session was on algorithm development for C/C++ programmers. Though I program in C and C++ seldom these days (Why would I? I have MATLAB!), the class was very informative. There are many features of the MATLAB interface which I ignored in the past which I learned about that day. My suggestion to readers is to consider attending one of these presentations, which you can learn about on the MathWorks Web site.
