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.