clinpubr (version 1.1.1)

get_var_types: Get variable types for baseline table

Description

Automatic variable type and method determination for baseline table.

Usage

get_var_types(
  data,
  strata = NULL,
  norm_test_by_group = TRUE,
  omit_factor_above = 20,
  num_to_factor = 5,
  save_qqplots = FALSE,
  folder_name = "qqplots"
)

Value

An object from class var_types, which is just list containing the following elements:

factor_vars

A character vector of variables that are factors.

exact_vars

A character vector of variables that require fisher exact test.

nonnormal_vars

A character vector of variables that are nonnormal.

omit_vars

A character vector of variables that are excluded form the baseline table.

strata

A character vector of the strata variable.

Arguments

data

A data frame.

strata

A character string indicating the column name of the strata variable.

norm_test_by_group

A logical value indicating whether to perform normality tests by group.

omit_factor_above

An integer indicating the maximum number of levels for a variable to be considered a factor.

num_to_factor

An integer. Numerical variables with number of unique values below or equal to this value would be considered a factor.

save_qqplots

A logical value indicating whether to save QQ plots. Sometimes the normality tests do not work well for some variables, and the QQ plots can be used to check the distribution.

folder_name

A character string indicating the folder name for saving QQ plots.

Examples

data(cancer, package = "survival")
get_var_types(cancer, strata = "sex") # set save_qqplots = TRUE to check the QQ plots

var_types <- get_var_types(cancer, strata = "sex")
# for some reason we want the variable "pat.karno" ro be considered normal.
var_types$nonnormal_vars <- setdiff(var_types$nonnormal_vars, "pat.karno")