is.vec.numeric {NCmisc}

Determine robustly whether a vector contains numeric data

Description

This is an improvement on base:is.numeric because data may be encoded as a different type (e.g, string) especially if imported from a file.

Usage

is.vec.numeric(x, logical.is.numeric = FALSE, thresh = 0.9)

Arguments

x

a vector to check for numeric status

logical.is.numeric

by default this is FALSE, which means logical vectors will return FALSE to being numeric. If set to TRUE, then a variable will get a return value of TRUE if it is based on numbers or appears to be of 'logical' type.

thresh

threshold to decide that a variable is numeric. NA values will be ignored in the test. Then it looks at the proportion of values that are successfully coerced to numeric without giving 'NA'. If this threshold is 0.9, then any column where at least 90 converted to numeric type, will return TRUE for this function call.

Value

returns a logical TRUE or FALSE for the numeric status of x.

Author(s)

Nicholas Cooper

Examples

numeric1 <- 1:10
numeric2 <- paste(1:10)
string <- paste("one", "two", "three", "four")
logic1 <- c(TRUE,FALSE,FALSE,TRUE,FALSE,NA)
numericish <- paste(c(NA, NA, 6:10, "5|6", "7|8", 1))
is.vec.numeric(numeric1)
is.vec.numeric(numeric2)
is.vec.numeric(string)
is.vec.numeric(logic1)
is.vec.numeric(logic1, logical.is.numeric=TRUE)
is.vec.numeric(numericish)
is.vec.numeric(numericish, thresh=0.7)