Hello, I am using the summary.formula function in the Hmisc package to produce tables. With the "method" argument set to "response", the help says, "Continuous independent variables (see the ?continuous? parameter below) are automatically stratified into ?g? (see below) quantile groups". By my reading, this makes it impossible to summarize a continuous variable with, for example, its correlation with the response variable. Is there some sort of functionality I'm missing here, or is this just not possible with how summary.formula is written now? Thanks, Erik Iverson
Erik Iverson wrote:> Hello, > > I am using the summary.formula function in the Hmisc package to produce > tables. > > With the "method" argument set to "response", the help says, > > "Continuous independent variables (see the ?continuous? parameter below) > are automatically stratified into ?g? (see below) quantile groups". > > By my reading, this makes it impossible to summarize a continuous > variable with, for example, its correlation with the response variable. > > Is there some sort of functionality I'm missing here, or is this just > not possible with how summary.formula is written now? > > Thanks, > Erik Iverson >That's an excellent question Erik. I think that summary.formula's default treatment of continuous predictors for method='response' needs to be improved. The table cell should be a loess plot and it could be summarized with a Spearman correlation coefficient. Anyone wanting to work on the code should get the master code from our subversion repository. Frank -- Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chairman School of Medicine Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University