prettyR (version 1.1-3)

describe: Description of variables

Description

Describes a vector or the columns in a matrix or data frame.

Usage

describe(x,num.desc=c("mean","median","var","sd","valid.n"),xname=NA,
  maxfac=8)

Arguments

x

A vector, matrix or data frame.

num.desc

The names of the functions to apply to numeric data.

xname

A name for the object x, mostly where this would be a very long string describing its structure (e.g. if it was extracted by name from a data frame).

maxfac

The maximum number of factors for describe.factor to display.

Value

• A list with three components:
• Numeric
  A matrix of the values returned from describe.numeric for each column described.
• Factor
  A matrix of the modal value and number of missing values for each column described.
• Logical
  A matrix of the counts of FALSE, TRUE and missing values for each column described.

Details

describe displays a table of descriptive statistics for numeric and factor variables in the object x. The summary measures for numeric variables can easily be altered with the argument num.desc. Pass a character vector with the names of the desired summary measures and these will be displayed at the top of the numeric block with their results beneath them. If quantiles are desired, the user will have to write wrapper functions that call quantile with the appropriate type or probabilities and use the names of the wrapper functions in num.desc. Remember that any function called by describe must have an na.rm argument.

See Also

Mode, valid.n, describe.numeric, describe.factor

Examples

sample.df<-data.frame(sex=sample(c("MALE","FEMALE"),100,TRUE),
  income=(rnorm(100)+2.5)*20000,suburb=factor(sample(1:4,100,TRUE)))
 # include the maximum values
 describe(sample.df,num.desc=c("mean","median","max","var","sd","valid.n"))