Describe a Factor

Compute descriptive statistics for a factor or character vector. The plot method displays absolute and relative frequencies in horizontal bar plots.

Usage

# S3 method for class 'factor'
desc(
  x,
  maxrows = NULL,
  ord = NULL,
  conf.level = 0.95,
  main = NULL,
  verbose = NULL,
  plotit = NULL,
  digits = NULL,
  ...
)

# S3 method for class 'character'
desc(
  x,
  maxrows = NULL,
  ord = NULL,
  conf.level = 0.95,
  main = NULL,
  verbose = NULL,
  plotit = NULL,
  digits = NULL,
  ...
)

# S3 method for class 'Desc.factor'
print(x, digits = NULL, ...)

Arguments

x

factor, ordered factor, or character vector to describe

maxrows

numeric; defines the maximum number of rows in a frequency table to be reported. For factors with many levels it is often not interesting to see all of them. Default is set to 12 most frequent ones (resp. the first ones if ord is set to "levels" or "names").

For a numeric argument x maxrows is the minimum number of unique values needed for a numeric variable to be treated as continuous. If left to its default NULL, x will be regarded as continuous if it has more than 12 single values. In this case the list of extreme values will be displayed and the frequency table else.

If maxrows is < 1 it will be interpreted as percentage. In this case just as many rows, as the maxrows most frequent levels will be shown. Say, if maxrows is set to 0.8, then the number of rows is fixed so, that the highest cumulative relative frequency is the first one going beyond 0.8.

Setting maxrows to Inf will unconditionally report all values and also produce a plot with type "h" instead of a histogram.

ord

character out of "name" (alphabetical order), "level", "asc" (by frequencies ascending), "desc" (by frequencies descending) defining the order for a frequency table as used for factors, numerics with few unique values and logicals. Factors (and character vectors) are by default ordered by their descending frequencies, ordered factors by their natural order.

conf.level

confidence level of the interval (default 0.95). If set to NA, no confidence interval is calculated.

main

character string, NULL, or NA, defining the main title. By default (main = NULL) the title will be composed as: (<class(es)>). If NA, no title is printed.

verbose

integer controlling verbosity of table output. One of 1 (minimal), 2 (default), 3 (extensive). Applies to tables only.

plotit

logical. Should a plot be created? The plot type depends on the classes of the variables. Default can be defined by the option plotit, if it does not exist then it's set to TRUE.

digits

number of digits used to format relative frequencies; the default can be set with setDescToolsXOption(digits = x)

...

further arguments passed to methods

Value

an object of class c("Desc.factor", "Desc") containing counts, frequency information, and metadata

Details

This function produces a rich description of a factor, containing length, number of NAs, number of levels and detailed frequencies of all levels. The order of the frequency table can be chosen between descending/ascending frequency, labels or levels. For ordered factors the order default is "level". Character vectors are treated as unordered factors. desc.character() converts x to a factor and then uses the factor method. Ordered factors use their intrinsic level order rather than descending frequency order.

Usage

Arguments

Value

Details

See also