Types of variables, treatment of
missing data
20.10. 2009
Types of variables (number of values)

continuous variables (any value within a
range)

discrete variables (finite number of values)
–
some discrete variables can be treated as
continuous (counts)
Types of variables (measurment)
Type of the data
Nominal
Measurment property
We can only differentiate
between the values
Ordinal
We can order them
Cardinal data
We use measurment unit
data$country<-as. factor(data$country)
data$qf1<-as.ordered(data$qf1)
data$vd8<-as.numeric (data$vd8)
Data type definition can be
• usefull = some of the procedures work differently for different types of the data
• an obstacle (sometimes you want to do something that is, strictly speaking, not allowed
Missing data




What is the nature of missing data?
How can we deal with misssing data
depends of their mechanism, i.e. mechanism
that produced them...
No easy answers...
All decisions about how to deal with missing
data have impacts the results...
Types of missing data

Missing completely at random (MCAR)
–
–

Missing at random (MAR)
–
–

probability that an observation Xi is missing is unrelated to the
value of X or any other veriable
weather conditions, failure of measuring equipment etc.
probability of missing value does not depend on the value of X
after controling for another variable
e.g. depressed people less likely to report income, when
controlling for depression, missing is random
Functional missing
–
prob. of missing = function of a variable
missingness has to be dealt with completely
missingness is ignorable
= do not have to model
missingness property
How to deal with missings
1.
2.
3.
4.
get rid of them - deletion (listwise,
casewise)
replace them by mean etc.
who are they? - regression analysis,
ANOVA
what they did not tell us?
–
imputation
Missing data in R


reserved value “NA”
important issue (build-in function have ussually no default
setup for dealing with NA’s = you have to specify
–
–
–

is it an error?
should it be ignored (deleted)?
should it be replaced by some value (mean)?
na.rm=T (remove all cases with missing values)
> a<-c(1,2,3,4,5,NA,NA)
>a
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 NA NA
> mean(a)
[1] NA #Why? Because you have not specified how to deal
with NA’s. #So try the following:
 > mean(a, na.rm=TRUE)
 [1] 3
How many NA’s?
> table(a)
a
12345
11111
> table(a, exclude=NULL)
a
1 2 3 4 5 <NA>
1 1 1 1 1 2
# to get relative counts
> prop.table(table(a, exclude=NULL))
a
1
2
3
4
5
<NA>
0.1428571 0.1428571 0.1428571 0.1428571 0.1428571 0.2857143
How to find NA’s?
#find complete cases (no NA’s):
> complete.cases(a)
[1] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE FALSE FALSE
> b<-c(NA,NA, 1,2,3,4,5)
> d<-cbind(a,b) #nyní máme matici 7x2
>d
a b
[1,] 1 NA
[2,] 2 NA
[3,] 3 1
[4,] 4 2
[5,] 5 3
[6,] NA 4
[7,] NA 5
This result can be used as an
argument in another funcion that
would filter out rows with missing
cases.
> complete.cases(d)
[1] FALSE FALSE TRUE TRUE TRUE FALSE FALSE
How to remove NA’s?
>d
a b
[1,] 1 NA
[2,] 2 NA
[3,] 3 1
[4,] 4 2
[5,] 5 3
[6,] NA 4
[7,] NA 5
> e<-d[complete.cases(d),]
>e
ab
[1,] 3 1
[2,] 4 2
[3,] 5 3
> e<-d[complete.cases(d)]
>e
[1] 3 4 5 1 2 3
!!!
Vrátí kompletní pozorování (v řádku) jako matici
Vrátí kompletní pozorování (v řádku) jako numerický vektor
By the way...

this a good trick how to filter the dataset
For example, you want to get Czech data only
czech.data<-data[data$country==17,]
Get your Eurobarometer data...
source<-file.choose()
data<-read.csv(source, header = T, sep = "\t")
How to recode certain values as NA‘s?
-
missings in the data
system missing (no information at all)
user-defined missing (can be thought of as missing) – “don’t know”, “undecided” – but
it always depends....
qf12
“Please tell me whether you totally agree, tend to agree, tend to disagree or totally
disagree with the following statement: You are ready to buy environmentally friendly
products even if they cost a little bit more.”
-
totally agree
tend to agree
tend to disagree
totally disagree
don’t know
> table(data$qf12, exclude=NULL)
1
2
3
4
5
7442 12947 3636 1292 1413
data$qf12<-ifelse(data$qf12==5, NA, data$qf12)
1
2
3
4 <NA>
7442 12947 3636 1292 1413
for testing of equality, the equal sign has
to be doubled (otherwise it is attribution
of a value)
Look at you variables

what type of variables are you interested in?
–
–
–

measurment?
continuous or descrete?
how can you describe them?
are there any missings in those variables?
–
–
–
what type (system or user-defined)?
how many?
is that a problem?
Questions? Comments?
Thank you for your attention!