Desc.factor: Describe a factor, an ordered factor or a character vector

Description

This reports a rich description of a factor, consisting out of 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.

Usage

## S3 method for class 'factor':
Desc(x, xname = NULL, ord = c("desc", "asc", "name", "level"), 
            maxrows = 12, digits = 3, plotit = FALSE, ...)

## S3 method for class 'ordered':
Desc(x, xname = NULL, ...)

## S3 method for class 'character':
Desc(x, xname = NULL, ...)

Arguments

a single factor, an ordered factor or a character vector to be described.

xname

the caption of the output.

ord

the order for the frequency table. Factors (and character vectors) are by default orderd by their descending frequencies, ordered factors by their natural order.

maxrows

numeric. Defines the maximum number of rows to be reported. For factors with lots of levels it is often not interesting to see all the levels. Default is 12 (most frequent ones). If maxrows < 1 then just as many rows, as the maxrows% most frequent fac

digits

integer. With how many digits shoud the relative frequencies be formatted? Default is 3.

plotit

boolean. Should a plot be created? The factor is plotted with PlotDesc.factor. Default is FALSE.

...

further argument to be passed to methods. For ordered factors and character vectors they are passed to Desc.factor.

Value

A list containing the following components:
lengththe length of the vector
nthe valid entries (NAs are excluded)
NAsnumber of NAs
levelsnumber of levels
uniquenumber of unique values. Note that need not be the same, as there might be empty levels. Of course unique values can never be less than the number of levels.
dupesboolean saying whether there are any duplicates in the vector.
frqa data.frame of absolute and relative frequencies given by Freq

Details

Desc.char converts x to a factor an processes x as factor. Desc.ordered only changes the standard order for the frequencies to it's intrinsic order, which means order "level" instead of "desc" in the factor case.

Examples

Run this code

# unordered factor
Desc(d.diamonds$colour)

# ordered factor
Desc(d.diamonds$clarity)

# just the 5 first groups of the factor
Desc(d.diamonds$colour, maxrows = 5)

# just as much rows, as the most frequent 80% of the factors use 
Desc(d.diamonds$colour, maxrows = 0.8)