The ability to compress a matrix that is stored in memory is not available in MATLAB. The numerical data that is usually stored in the matrices is already stored in an efficient format.
A compression algorithm thus would not achieve any meaningful compression rates unless a lot of the elements are the equal. Compression algorithms are very time consuming and would slow down calculations.
To work around this issue, if your matrix contains a large amount of elements that are equal to cero, use the function SPARSE to create a sparse matrix that will store the matrix in a more memory-efficient way. Furthermore, and depending on your application, using a data type will less precision will also reduce the memory requirements of a large matrix.
