Warning message with perccalc package"

In perccalc: Estimate Percentiles from an Ordered Categorical Variable

While the other vignette shows you how to use perccalc appropriately, there are instances where there's just too few categories to estimate percentiles properly. Imagine estimating a distribution of 1:100 percentiles with only three ordered categories, it just sounds too far fetched.

Let's load our packages.

library(perccalc)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)

For example, take the survey data on smoking habits.

smoking_data <-
  MASS::survey %>% # you will need to install the MASS package
  as_tibble() %>%
  select(Sex, Smoke, Pulse) %>%
  rename(
    gender = Sex,
    smoke = Smoke,
    pulse_rate = Pulse
  )

The final results is this dataset:

smoking_data %>%
  arrange(pulse_rate)

Note that there's only four categories in the smoke variable. Let's try to estimate the percentile difference.

smoking_data <-
  smoking_data %>%
  mutate(smoke = factor(smoke,
                        levels = c("Never", "Occas", "Regul", "Heavy"),
                        ordered = TRUE))

perc_diff(smoking_data, smoke, pulse_rate)

perc_diff returns the estimated coefficient but also warns you that it's difficult for the function to estimate the standard error. This happens similarly for perc_dist.

perc_dist(smoking_data, smoke, pulse_rate) %>%
  head()

perccalc documentation built on Dec. 18, 2019, 1:38 a.m.