nroPreprocess: Data cleaning and standardization

In Numero: Statistical Framework to Define Subgroups in Complex Datasets

Data cleaning and standardization

Description

Convert to numerical values, remove unusable rows and columns, and standardize scale of each variable.

Usage

nroPreprocess(data, method = "standard", clip = 5.0,
    resolution = 100, trim = FALSE)

Arguments

data	A matrix or a data frame.
method	Method for standardizing scale and location, see details below.
clip	Range for truncating extreme values in multiples of standard deviations.
resolution	Maximum number of sampling points to capture distribution shape.
trim	if TRUE, empty rows and columns are removed.

Details

Standardization methods include empty string for no action, "standard" for centering by mean and division by standard deviation, "uniform" for normalized ranks between -1 and 1, "tapered" for a version of the rank-based method that puts more samples around zero and "normal" for quantile-based mapping to standard normal distribution.

The standard method also checks if the distribution is skewed and applies logarithm if it makes the distribution closer to the normal curve.

Value

A matrix of numerical values. A value mapping model is stored in the attribute 'mapping'. The names of binary columns are stored in the attribute 'binary'.

Author(s)

Ville-Petteri Makinen

Examples

# Import data.
fname <- system.file("extdata", "finndiane.txt", package = "Numero")
dataset <- read.delim(file = fname)

# Show original data characteristics.
print(summary(dataset))

# Detect binary columns.
ds <- nroPreprocess(dataset, method = "")
print(attr(ds,"binary"))

# Centering and scaling cholesterol.
ds <- nroPreprocess(dataset$CHOL)
print(summary(ds))

# Centering and scaling.
ds <- nroPreprocess(dataset)
print(summary(ds))

# Tapered ranks.
ds <- nroPreprocess(dataset, method = "tapered")
print(summary(ds))

# Standard normal ranks.
ds <- nroPreprocess(dataset, method = "normal")
print(summary(ds))

Numero documentation built on Sept. 13, 2025, 1:09 a.m.