validatetools {validatetools}

Tools for validation rules

Description

validatetools is a utility package for managing validation rule sets that are defined with validate. In production systems validation rule sets tend to grow organically and accumulate redundant or (partially) contradictory rules. 'validatetools' helps to identify problems with large rule sets and includes simplification methods for resolving issues.

Problem detection

The following methods allow for problem detection:

• is_infeasible checks a rule set for feasibility. An infeasible system must be corrected to be useful.

• detect_boundary_num shows for each numerical variable the allowed range of values.

• detect_boundary_cat shows for each categorical variable the allowed range of values.

• detect_fixed_variables shows variables whose value is fixated by the rule set.

• detect_redundancy shows which rules are already implied by other rules.

Simplifying rule set

The following methods detect possible simplifications and apply them to a rule set.

• substitute_values: replace variables with constants.

• simplify_fixed_variables: substitute the fixed variables with their values in a rule set.

• simplify_conditional: remove redundant (parts of) conditional rules.

• remove_redundancy: remove redundant rules.

References

Statistical Data Cleaning with Applications in R, Mark van der Loo and Edwin de Jonge, ISBN: 978-1-118-89715-7