Detect variable type

hd_detect_vartype() detects the type of a variable based on its content. If a variable is a factor or character, it is considered categorical. If a variable is numeric and has less than or equal to unique_threshold unique values, it is considered categorical. Otherwise, it is considered continuous.

Usage

hd_detect_vartype(var, unique_threshold = 5)

Arguments

var

The variable (vector or dataframe column)to detect the type of.

unique_threshold

The threshold to consider a numeric variable as categorical. Default is 5.

Value

The type of the variable as a string: "categorical", "continuous", or "unknown".

Details

If you want to apply this function to each column of a dataframe, you can use the sapply() function. See examples. For more information check sapply documentation.

Examples

# Check categorical data
category <- c("A", "B", "A", "C")
hd_detect_vartype(category)
#> [1] "categorical"

# Check continuous data
continuous <- c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
hd_detect_vartype(continuous)
#> [1] "continuous"

# Apply the function to each column of a dataframe
example <- data.frame(Category = c("A", "B", "A", "C", "B", "A"),
                      Continuous = c(1.1, 2.5, 3.8, 4.0, 5.8, 9),
                      Mixed = c(1, "1", 2, 2, "3", 3))

sapply(example, hd_detect_vartype)
#>      Category    Continuous         Mixed 
#> "categorical"  "continuous" "categorical"