counting runs of a certain length in binary data

[Mike Miller]

Here's a problem:  I want to count the number of times in a sequence of
binary digits that I observe a run of N or more digits that are the same.  
I think there must be an easy and efficient way to get Octave to pump out
an answer.

For example, if this were my vector of binary digits

[0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1]'
   ^     # ^   #       ^   # ^     #

I would count four runs of length 2 or greater.  (I've marked the
beginning of each run with '^' and the end with '#'.)

I have been able to get Octave to tell me how many times I have a run of
length 2 or more using the code given in the third line below:

octave:1> m=100; n=10;
octave:2> X=(rand(m,n)<.5);
octave:3> sum(diff([ones(1,n);abs(diff(X))])==-1)
ans =

  24  25  27  24  25  31  23  26  25  26

The first line tells the size of the matrix, the second line generates a
matrix of binary scores and the third line counts the number of runs of
length two or more for every column of the input matrix.

Does anyone have any neat ways of counting runs of length greater than
two?  I assume 'diff' would be used repeatedly somehow.

Mike



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