Reproducible research: tracking experiments / logbook of past .m file executions

Dear MATLAB users,

is there any accepted strategy for tracking experiments in MATLAB? I think of using some kind of "logbook" that lists all past executions of an .m file, possibly combined with version control...

Best regards, Philipp

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

My approach would be to create a mat-file that the ‘.m’ file writes at each execution. As for version control, you could create a ‘version’ variable of update date strings and perhaps comments (cell array) that would be appended to the mat-file each time the ‘.m’ file ran.

Answer 2

[Jonathan A]

Hi Philipp,

My answer might come a little bit late, but in case someone else needs it, I uploaded a lightweight scientific workflow tool I am always using to manage and track information (data and function executions) in my experiments.

Here is the link: https://de.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/71180-explore-scientific-workflow-management-tool

With this, it is possible to call the following method:

explo.info();

This displays the last time each function of your experiment changed. Hope this helps.