I'm looking for an analogy to SPSS and "variable lable" and "value lable" in R. I have a copy of S+4.0 and can't find any info in their docs, and don't find it in R-intro either. In SPSS, for each variable, there is a name like VAR001 and a variable lable (a longer descriptive string) like Respondent ID and for many of the values of other variables there are value lables. For example, VAR008 has the lable GENDER of Respondent and it has values of 0 and 1, and the values are labled 0 Male 1 Female Sometimes value lables are much longer strings. Whenever a person runs a model in SPSS, the printout automatically finds the lable and prints it along with the variable name and the values are replaced by their lables. In R, does one keep a list of variable lables and value lables? If so, where? It seems to me that an R collection type like Map or Hash would be needed so one could put in a variable name and get back a lable. -- Paul E. Johnson email: pauljohn at ukans.edu Dept. of Political Science http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn University of Kansas Office: (785) 864-9086 Lawrence, Kansas 66045 FAX: (785) 864-5700 -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._
We've been here before, so check the archives.
Aren't they labels, not lables?
R can use sensible names directly. In particular, given S/R has factors,
I don't see that `variable lables' add anything:
gender <- factor(c(0,1,1), labels=c("Male", "Female"))
seems all you need.
There are also comment attributes in R:
VAR001 <- gender
comment(VAR001) <- "Gender of Respondent"
which might play the role of "variable lable" if you really can't
use
meaningful names.
On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Paul E Johnson wrote:
> I'm looking for an analogy to SPSS and "variable lable" and
"value
> lable" in R. I have a copy of S+4.0 and can't find any info in
their
> docs, and don't find it in R-intro either.
>
>
> In SPSS, for each variable, there is a name like
>
> VAR001
>
> and a variable lable (a longer descriptive string) like
>
> Respondent ID
>
> and for many of the values of other variables there are value lables.
> For example, VAR008 has the lable
>
> GENDER of Respondent
>
> and it has values of 0 and 1, and the values are labled
>
> 0 Male
> 1 Female
>
> Sometimes value lables are much longer strings.
>
> Whenever a person runs a model in SPSS, the printout automatically finds
> the lable and prints it along with the variable name and the values are
> replaced by their lables.
>
> In R, does one keep a list of variable lables and value lables? If so,
> where? It seems to me that an R collection type like Map or Hash would
> be needed so one could put in a variable name and get back a lable.
>
> --
> Paul E. Johnson email: pauljohn at ukans.edu
> Dept. of Political Science http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
> University of Kansas Office: (785) 864-9086
> Lawrence, Kansas 66045 FAX: (785) 864-5700
>
>
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>
--
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272860 (secr)
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Yes, when I first made the switch from SPSS to SAS and R, I had the same question. I quite liked the way SPSS did this. I also liked the FileInfo menu option (I think that was the name of it), which essentially supplied a verbose description of the data set based on the variable and value labels. Here's some pointers to help with the transition: VALUE LABELS: See help(factor). The factor() function has a label option that allows the setting of value labels for R factors (e.g., Gender; Ethnicity). VARIABLE LABELS: I'm not aware of an exact equivalent. To name a field/variable/column in an R data frame, I use the names() function. R allows for long names (even with spaces as long as you use quotes) and thus I haven't found variable labels to be all that necessary. The old SPSS allowed only 8 characters and thus labels were necessary for files with lots of variables. The only time that I *really* want a longer, descriptive label is when I'm creating figures or tables, at which point I use the xlab/ylab options for plot. For tables, I usually create a separate dataframe containing only those data that will be in the table and use the names() function. In other words work with short names for 90% of the time and use long names in plots for the other 10% where I'm presenting results. Finally, when I used SPSS for work in psychology, I found that people often stored large SPSS data files with lots (e.g., 3000) of variables (columns) and a few (e.g., 200) observations (rows). In these situations, variable labels were absolutely necessary. If you need to deal with such an issue, I would recommend that you look into using R with an underlying database (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL). Store the large SPSS file in the database where every field can be fully documented in a database table. Then, when the time comes to do an analysis requiring R, pull only the relevant fields into R using the database connection. I've found the R/Database combo to be a fully functional system where both parts outperform the all-in-one systems such as SPSS and SAS. Loren On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Paul E Johnson wrote:> I'm looking for an analogy to SPSS and "variable lable" and "value > lable" in R. I have a copy of S+4.0 and can't find any info in their > docs, and don't find it in R-intro either. > > > In SPSS, for each variable, there is a name like > > VAR001 > > and a variable lable (a longer descriptive string) like > > Respondent ID > > and for many of the values of other variables there are value lables. > For example, VAR008 has the lable > > GENDER of Respondent > > and it has values of 0 and 1, and the values are labled > > 0 Male > 1 Female > > Sometimes value lables are much longer strings. > > Whenever a person runs a model in SPSS, the printout automatically finds > the lable and prints it along with the variable name and the values are > replaced by their lables. > > In R, does one keep a list of variable lables and value lables? If so, > where? It seems to me that an R collection type like Map or Hash would > be needed so one could put in a variable name and get back a lable. > > -- > Paul E. Johnson email: pauljohn at ukans.edu > Dept. of Political Science http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn > University of Kansas Office: (785) 864-9086 > Lawrence, Kansas 66045 FAX: (785) 864-5700 > > -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- > r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html > Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" > (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch > _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._ >-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._