Octave incompatibility with cov() in pcaPmtk.m

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What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Download pmtk3-23nov10.zip or the current svn
2. run initPmtk3 then testPmtk3 in current Octave

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

I expect to see the tests all pass. Instead, I receive the error message:

error: cov: x and y must have the same number of observations
error: called from:
error:   /usr/share/octave/3.2.4/m/statistics/base/cov.m at line 56, column 7
error: evaluating argument list element number 1
error: evaluating argument list element number 1
error:   
/home/jpate/git/prosodicParsing/pmt3k/pmtk3-23nov10/toolbox/LatentVariableModels
/ppca/sub/pcaPmtk.m at line 31, column 18
error:   
/home/jpate/git/prosodicParsing/pmt3k/pmtk3-23nov10/demos/bookDemos/Latent_facto
r_models_for_continuous_data/pcaDemo2d.m at line 12, column 28
error:   /home/jpate/git/prosodicParsing/pmt3k/pmtk3-23nov10/testPmtk3.m at 
line 75, column 

cov is different in octave and matlab, see:

http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/cov.html
http://octave.sourceforge.net/octave/function/cov.html



What version / revision of the product are you using? On what operating
system?

Again, this is with both a fresh svn clone and the .zip file in the Downloads 
page.

$ uname -a
Linux PURPLE-HAZE 2.6.36-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Jan 8 14:15:27 CET 2011 x86_64 
Celeron(R) Dual-Core CPU T3000 @ 1.80GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
$ octave -v
GNU Octave, version 3.2.4
Copyright (C) 2009 John W. Eaton and others.
This is free software; see the source code for copying conditions.
There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Octave was configured for "x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu".

Additional information about Octave is available at http://www.octave.org.

Please contribute if you find this software useful.
For more information, visit http://www.octave.org/help-wanted.html

Report bugs to <bug@octave.org> (but first, please read
http://www.octave.org/bugs.html to learn how to write a helpful report).



Please provide any additional information below.

We see that line 32 of testPmtk3.m is commented out and the offending line 31 
is added in revision 2551 with

svn blame toolbox/LatentVariableModels/ppca/sub/pcaPmtk.m 

but there is no commit message. I tried uncommenting 32 and commenting out line 
31, and all tests from testPmtk3 pass.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by john.ken...@gmail.com on 17 Jan 2011 at 12:30

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Moved to GitHub: https://github.com/probml/pmtk3/issues/14

Original comment by irosen on 4 Jan 2014 at 2:33