Comparing 2 vectors: finding closest point

If I have 2 vectors, say:

x=[1 2 3 4 5];
y=[0 1.1 1.5 1.6 2.4 4.1 4.7 5 5.7];

I want to find the index of the closest match in y, for each index in x. So, for x(1) it would be y(2), for x(2) it would be y(5), etc. Also, it would be nice to have the counts of y values for each x index that occur before the next x index. For example, x(1) it would be 3 (1.1, 1.5, 1.6). x(3) it would be 0.

I was trying to use histc for this, with x specifying the edges, but didn't know if there was a different approach.

Answer 1

[Azzi Abdelmalek]

x=[1 2 3 4 5];
y=[0 1.1 1.5 1.6 2.4 4.1 4.7 5 5.7];
for k=1:numel(x)
  [val,idx]=min(abs(y-x(k)));
  xx(k)=y(idx);
end