Data manipulation for statistical analysis

Dear All,

I just wondering instead of recoding variables as 0 1 or 1 2 3 4, can MATLAB, like in R, directly work on the ordinal or nominal characters as a part of the analysis ?

I used "dataset" to import the data, where ordinal or nominal variables were in their character forms, say Sex: Male/Female.

But, it's a cell array. Then I used "nominal" function to redefine them.

However, in either way, the variable cannot be used in the analysis such as"glmfit", as the algorithm written is to check "isnan". Unfortunately, "isnan" does NOT work in either of cell array or nominal data.

Therefore, is recoding the only way that I can do the statistical analysis in MATLAB ?

Thanks and Regards