In wang114/foofactorsran: Make factors less annoying

foofactorsran

Introduction

This is a mini package built by Ran Wang by extending the foofactors packages from STAT547 class. It focused on tools for working with factors. The functions fbind() and freq_out() already existed in the original foofactors package. Their tests and function documentations were also carried over. The goals of this package are:

• Reorder the factor levels as they appear in the data order_asit()
• Set order of the factor levels factor_level()
• Combine factor levels fbind()
• Define age group for numerical ages age_group()
• Make a frequency table for a factor freq_out()

You can install:

this package like other packages by:

install_github("wang114/foofactorsran")

Note that some functions in this packages requires dplyr.

Learning foofactorsran

To get started, read the notes on this page and read into vignette:hello-foofactorsran for details.

Factors in R are vectors of a finite length which takes on certain number of different values (levels). They are usually characters or numeric. Statistically, factors are referred as categorical variables. We usually expect each level of the factor to appear multiple times in the vector, but it's up to the user how to construct the factor.

Some really simple examples are:

 x <- c(1,2,2,"a","a")
    class(x)
    (y1 <- factor(x))
    (y2 <- factor(x, labels = c("red","blue","apple")))
    (y3 <- factor(x, levels = c("1","2","a","b")))
    levels(y1)
    levels(y2)

Factors are confusing in a lot of ways. The levels of a factor are the possible values that the vector x will take, so x%in%levels==FALSE does not make sense in general. However, levels of x may not be all appeared in x, and droplevels() is the functions that drops the unused levels of x. The labels argument replaces each element of x by labeling the levels of x.

The order of the factor levels matter a lot, especially in plots. The default order of factor levels is alphabetical, which is meaningless under a lot of situations. Functions in this package will help you to reorder factor levels in a much easy way.

Please also read Be the boss of your factors to learn more about factors in R.

wang114/foofactorsran documentation built on May 4, 2019, 12:57 a.m.