The hardware and bandwidth for this mirror is donated by dogado GmbH, the Webhosting and Full Service-Cloud Provider. Check out our Wordpress Tutorial.
If you wish to report a bug, or if you are interested in having us mirror your free-software or open-source project, please feel free to contact us at mirror[@]dogado.de.

Displaying the frequencies of vectors of integers or factors

Because freq() depends upon tabulate(), there are a number of workarounds in the function. Most of these are due to the way that a vector of integers is translated into a factor object. Numeric factor objects are formed by simply using numbers starting with 1 as levels. This means that if zeros are the first level in a factor object, the count of zeros will be labeled "1", the next value "2" and so on. Values that aren't present will be skipped. So if you have a bunch of perfectly valid zeros in your data and a category or two with no observations, you will get a result that looks markedly different from what you might expect. Worse still, you might get a result that looks meaningful, but doesn't represent the data in the way you think it does.

If category labels are supplied to freq(), it uses them, but otherwise it will try to use the entire range of values, displaying zero observations where necessary. Zeros only seem to be a problem when they are the first category, so the trick of adding 1 to the values is only applied in this case. Finally, tabulate() doesn't like NAs, so they have to be counted separately, removed, then added to the frequency counts after tabulate() has done its job.

Finally, freq() will display category percentages if they are requested. freq() is a good introduction to getting R to display output in a form that can be presented to those used to the vanilla stats report.

Back to Table of Contents

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
Health stats visible at Monitor.