count.events: count.events

Description

Creates a count of the number of events that occurred within each group from a panel data structure, based on specified binary outcome variables.

Usage

count.events(
  dat,
  outcome.names,
  grouping.variables = NULL,
  type = "overall",
  na.rm = TRUE
)

Value

Returns a data.table object containing the counts of events. The counts are aggregated based on the specified 'grouping.variables'. Each row corresponds to a group defined by 'grouping.variables' and contains counts of the specified 'outcome.names'. If 'type' is "distinct", the count reflects distinct occurrences of events; if 'type' is "overall", it reflects the total count of records with TRUE/1 for the 'outcome.names'. The output structure makes it easy to understand the distribution of events across the different groups or categories defined in the data set.

Arguments

dat: A data frame structured as a panel data set.
outcome.names: A character vector of variable names from dat that are expected to be binary (1/0, TRUE/FALSE). The function calculates the count of these variables being TRUE/1 in the specified interval. Variables not found in dat or not binary will be disregarded.
grouping.variables: A character vector of variable names from dat to group the resulting counts. If NULL, the function computes the overall count without grouping.
type: Specifies the counting method: "distinct" for counting only new occurrences separated by zeros (useful for events like hospitalizations spanning multiple records), or "overall" (default) for counting all records with the value of TRUE/1.
na.rm: A logical indicating whether missing values should be ignored in the calculations. Defaults to TRUE.