read.md.demographics {fsbrain}

Read demographics file

Description

Load a list of subjects and metadata from a demographics file, i.e., a tab-separated file containing an arbitrary number of columns, one of which must be the subject id.

Usage

read.md.demographics(
  demographics_file,
  column_names = NULL,
  header = FALSE,
  scale_and_center = FALSE,
  sep = "",
  report = FALSE,
  stringsAsFactors = TRUE,
  group_column_name = NULL
)

Arguments

demographics_file

string. The path to the file.

column_names

vector of strings. The column names to set in the returned dataframe. The length must match the number of columns in the file.

header

logical. Whether the file starts with a header line.

scale_and_center

logical. Whether to center and scale the data. Defaults to FALSE.

sep

string. Separator passed to read.table, defaults to tabulator.

report

logical. Whether to write an overview, i.e., some descriptive statistics for each column, to STDOUT. Defaults to FALSE. See report.on.demographics.

stringsAsFactors

logical. Whether to convert strings in the input data to factors. Defaults to TRUE.

group_column_name

string or NULL. If given, the column name of the group column. It must be a factor column with 2 levels. Enables group-comparison tests. Defaults to NULL.

Value

a dataframe. The data in the file. String columns will be returned as factors, which you may want to adapt afterwards for the subject identifier column.

See Also

Other metadata functions: demographics.to.fsgd.file(), read.md.subjects(), report.on.demographics()

Examples

   demographics_file =
   system.file("extdata", "demographics.tsv", package = "fsbrain", mustWork = TRUE);
   column_names = c("subject_id", "group", "age");
   demographics = read.md.demographics(demographics_file,
   header = TRUE, column_names = column_names, report = FALSE);