Performing Bit modification on Floating point numbers in Matlab

Question

I'm working in Matlab using Non-negative Matrix factorization to decompose a matrix into two factors. Using this I get from A two double precision floating point matrices, B and C.

sample results are

B(1,1) = 0.118
C(1,1) = 112.035

I am now trying to modify specific bits within these values but using the bitset function on either values I get an error because bitset requires unsigned integers.

I have also tried using dec2bin function, which I assumed would convert decimals to binary but it returns '0' for B(1,1).

Does anyone know of any way to deal with floats at bit level without losing precision?

Answer 1

You should look into the typecast and bitset functions. (Doc here and here respectively). That lets you do stuff like

xb = typecast( 1.0, 'uint64' );
xb = bitset( xb, 10, 1 );
typecast( xb, 'double' );