I have not used Math::MatrixReal before and am press for time to go through it now, but am sure the module can convert from column to row. If so, prepare your data in the way you wanted like so:

use warnings;
use strict;

use Data::Dumper;

my $mref = [ [ '5', '4', '4', '2', '4' ],];

my @data;

  for (@$mref){
    push @data, map {[$_]} @{$_}
  }

print Dumper \@data;
[download]

and make the the module do the rest.
Output

$VAR1 = [
          [
            '5'
          ],
          [
            '4'
          ],
          [
            '4'
          ],
          [
            '2'
          ],
          [
            '4'
          ]
        ];
[download]

However, if the module does this, it might be cleaner and perhaps faster.