Can you provide a small sample of numbers in a txt or mat file instead of a zip file? Also, the sparse format in MATLAB does not store 0's. Trying to create such a matrix, even using hacks, would only result in an invalid sparse matrix and would violate assumptions made in background sparse matrix operations. Why do you think you need to physically store 0's in your sparse matrix?
Normally one would read in the data and then generate the sparse matrix from this data, which unfortunately results in two copies of the data in memory. The only ways I know of to read data directly into a sparse matrix would be to use a mex routine or to have the data in a mat file (e.g., text version) already in sparse format. Is the size of the matrix and the number of elements known prior to reading the elements?
