Learn R Programming

BaSTA (version 1.9.5)

DataCheck: A function to check the input data file for a Bayesian Survival Trajectory Analysis (BaSTA) analysis.

Description

This function performs some basic error checking on the input files for a BaSTA analysis. A number of checks are performed including; (1) individuals dying before the observation window starts; (2) individuals with no observations of any kind (i.e. phantom individuals); (3) individuals with birth date recorded as being after death date; (4) individuals with observations recorded after death; (5) individuals with observations before birth; (6) years of birth must appear as 0 in the observation matrix; (7) years of death must appear as 0 in the observation matrix.

Usage

DataCheck(object, studyStart, studyEnd, autofix = rep(0, 7), 
       silent = TRUE)

Value

ok

A logical indicator that indicates if the data are free of errors or not. i.e. TRUE = the data have no apparent errors, and FALSE = there is at leat one error.

newData

A corrected data frame.

type1

A vector of row numbers in the original data frame where there are deaths occurring before the study starts.

type2

A vector of row numbers in the original data frame where there are no birth/death AND no obervations.

type3

A vector of row numbers in the original data frame where there are births recorded after death.

type4

A vector of row numbers in the original data frame where there are observations (i.e. recaptures) after death.

type5

A vector of row numbers in the original data frame where there are observations (i.e. recaptures) before birth.

type6

A vector of row numbers in the original data frame where the year of birth is not a zero in the recapture matrix.

type7

A vector of row numbers in the original data frame where the year of death is not a zero in the recapture matrix.

Arguments

object

A data.frame to be used as an input data file for BaSTA. The first column is the individual's ID, the second and third columns are birth and death years respectively. Columns 4 to nt+3 represent the observation window of nt years. This is followed (optionally) by columns for covariate.

studyStart

The start year of the observation window.

studyEnd

The end year of the observation window.

autofix

A vector argument with a length of 7 indicating whether to automatically fix any errors (see details). This should be used with extreme caution. We recommend going back to the individual-based data and fixing each error "by hand".

silent

A logical argument indicating whether to print a detailed report to the screen or not.

Author

Owen R. Jones jones@biology.sdu.dk and Fernando Colchero colchero@imada.sdu.dk

Details

Argument autofix allows the user to fix the potential errors by specifying a code for each fix. Below are the descriptions of the actions that are taken depending on the error type and the fix code:

Type 1: 0 = do nothing; 1 = remove from dataframe.

Type 2: 0 = do nothing; 1 = remove from dataframe.

Type 3: 0 = do nothing; 1 = replace death records with 0; 2 = replace birth records with 0; 3 = replace both birth and death records with 0.

Type 4: 0 = do nothing; 1 = remove spurious post-death observations.

Type 5: 0 = do nothing; 1 = remove observations that pre-date year of birth.

Type 6: 0 = do nothing; 1 = replace birth year element of observation matrix with 0.

Type 7: 0 = do nothing; 1 = replace death year element of observation matrix with 0.

See Also

basta