scrub: A utility for basic data cleaning and recoding. Changes values outside of minimum and maximum limits to NA.

Description

A tedious part of data analysis is addressing the problem of miscoded data that need to be converted to NA. For a given data.frame or matrix, scrub will set all values of columns from=from to to=to that are less than a set (vector) of min values or more than a vector of max values to NA. Can also be used to do basic recoding of data for all values=isvalue to newvalue.

Usage

scrub(x, where, min, max,isvalue,newvalue)

Arguments

a data frame or matrix

where

The variables to examine. (Can be by name or by column number)

min

a vector of minimum values that are acceptable

max

a vector of maximum values that are acceptable

isvalue

a vector of values to be converted to newvalue (one per variable)

newvalue

a vector of values to replace those that match isvalue

Value

The corrected data frame.

Details

Solves a tedious problem that can be done directly but that is sometimes awkward. Will either replace specified values with NA or

Examples

Run this code

data(attitude)
x <- scrub(attitude,isvalue =c(30,40,50), newvalue = c(930,940,950))  #will change all occurences
x1 <- scrub(attitude, where=4, isvalue =c(30,40,50), newvalue = c(930,940,950)) #will just do it for the 4th column
#get rid of a complicated set of cases and replace with missing values
y <- scrub(attitude,where=2:4,min=c(20,30,40),max= c(120,110,100),isvalue= c(32,43,54))
y
scrub(attitude,where="learning",isvalue=68,newvalue=999) #change a column by name
scrub(attitude,where="learning",min=45,newvalue=999) #change a column by name