A coarsened factor, produced by the function coarsened,
is an extended type of factor whose elements may be fully observed,
partially observed, or missing. The full set of attributes of a
coarsened factor may be obtained by attributes, and
individual attributes are available with attr. The functions
documented on this page are convenient alternatives to attr.
The elements of baseLevels, a character vector of length
nBaseLevels, represent states of complete knowledge. The
elements of coarseLevels, a character vector of length
nCoarseLevels, represent states of incomplete or missing
information. Each element of coarseLevels maps onto two or more
elements of baseLevels. The attribute mapping is an
integer matrix with nCoarseLevels rows and nBaseLevels
columns, with 1 in position [i,j] if coarse level
i contains base level j. The last coarse level is
always NA, and it contains every base level.