R: as.data.frame method for CrunchDataset

dataset-to-R {crunch}

R Documentation

as.data.frame method for CrunchDataset

Description

This method is defined principally so that you can use a CrunchDataset as a data argument to other R functions (such as stats::lm()) without needing to download the whole dataset. You can, however, choose to download a true data.frame.

Usage

## S3 method for class 'CrunchDataset'
as.data.frame(
  x,
  row.names = NULL,
  optional = FALSE,
  force = FALSE,
  categorical.mode = "factor",
  row.order = NULL,
  include.hidden = TRUE,
  ...
)

## S3 method for class 'CrunchDataFrame'
as.data.frame(
  x,
  row.names = NULL,
  optional = FALSE,
  include.hidden = attr(x, "include.hidden"),
  ...
)

Arguments

`x`	a `CrunchDataset` or `CrunchDataFrame`
`row.names`	part of `as.data.frame` signature. Ignored.
`optional`	part of `as.data.frame` signature. Ignored.
`force`	logical: actually coerce the dataset to `data.frame`, or leave the columns as unevaluated promises. Default is `FALSE`.
`categorical.mode`	what mode should categoricals be pulled as? One of factor, numeric, id (default: factor)
`row.order`	vector of indices. Which, and their order, of the rows of the dataset should be presented as (default: `NULL`). If `NULL`, then the Crunch Dataset order will be used.
`include.hidden`	logical: should hidden variables be included? (default: `TRUE`)
`...`	additional arguments passed to `as.data.frame` (default method).

Details

By default, the as.data.frame method for CrunchDataset does not return a data.frame but instead CrunchDataFrame, which behaves like a data.frame without bringing the whole dataset into memory. When you access the variables of a CrunchDataFrame, you get an R vector, rather than a CrunchVariable. This allows modeling functions that require select columns of a dataset to retrieve only those variables from the remote server, rather than pulling the entire dataset into local memory.

If you call as.data.frame() on a CrunchDataset with force = TRUE, you will instead get a true data.frame. You can also get this data.frame by calling as.data.frame on a CrunchDataFrame (effectively calling as.data.frame on the dataset twice)

When a data.frame is returned, the function coerces Crunch Variable values into their R equivalents using the following rules:

Numeric variables become numeric vectors
Text variables become character vectors
Datetime variables become either Date or POSIXt vectors
Categorical variables become either factors with levels matching the Crunch Variable's categories (the default), or, if categorical.mode is specified as "id" or "numeric", a numeric vector of category ids or numeric values, respectively
Array variables (Categorical Array, Multiple Response) are decomposed into their constituent categorical subvariables. An array with three subvariables, for example, will result in three columns in the data.frame.

Column names in the data.frame are the variable/subvariable aliases.

Value