R help - Apr 2010 - Data manipulation problem

Dear R?ers.

I?ve got a dataset with age and year of diagnosis. In order to age-standardize
the incidence I need to transform the data into a matrix with age-groups
(divided in 5 or 10 years) along one axis and year divided into 5 years along
the other axis. Each cell should contain the number of cases for that age group
and for that period.

I.e.
My data format now is
ID-age (to one decimal)-year(yearly data).

What I?d like is 


age 1960-1965 1966-1970 etc...
0-5 3 8 10 15
6-10 2 5 8 13
etc..


Any good ideas?

Regards,
M

?cut to create categories
?table to make the table

moleps wrote:
> Dear R?ers.
> 
> I?ve got a dataset with age and year of diagnosis. In order to
age-standardize the incidence I need to transform the data into a matrix with
age-groups (divided in 5 or 10 years) along one axis and year divided into 5
years along the other axis. Each cell should contain the number of cases for
that age group and for that period.
> 
> I.e.
> My data format now is
> ID-age (to one decimal)-year(yearly data).
> 
> What I?d like is 
> 
> 
> age 1960-1965 1966-1970 etc...
> 0-5 3 8 10 15
> 6-10 2 5 8 13
> etc..
> 
> 
> Any good ideas?
> 
> Regards,
> M
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

You have tempted, and being weak, I yield to temptation:

"Any good ideas?"

Yes. Don't do this.

(what you probably really want to do is fit a model with age as a factor,
which can be done statistically e.g. by logistic regression; or graphically
using conditioning plots, e.g. via trellis graphics (the lattice package).
This avoids the arbitrariness and discontinuities of binning by age range.)

Bert Gunter
Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics
 
 -----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org]
On
Behalf Of moleps
Sent: Monday, April 05, 2010 11:46 AM
To: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: [R] Data manipulation problem

Dear R?ers.

I?ve got a dataset with age and year of diagnosis. In order to
age-standardize the incidence I need to transform the data into a matrix
with age-groups (divided in 5 or 10 years) along one axis and year divided
into 5 years along the other axis. Each cell should contain the number of
cases for that age group and for that period. 

I.e.
My data format now is
ID-age (to one decimal)-year(yearly data).

What I?d like is 


age 1960-1965 1966-1970 etc...
0-5 3 8 10 15
6-10 2 5 8 13
etc..


Any good ideas?

Regards,
M

______________________________________________
R-help at r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.