cleanAgeGroup {dembase} | R Documentation

## Clean up age group labels

### Description

Reformat a vector of age-group labels, so that it matches the format expected by functions such as `Counts` and `Values`.

### Usage

    cleanAgeGroup(age)

    cleanAgeGroupConc(age)

### Arguments

`age` | A vector of age labels.

### Details

`cleanAgeGroup` strips off spaces or other symbols, converts text to numbers, and otherwise tries to guess at the age-group labels.

It is common for age groups to be coded using only the first year, so that, for instance, `0`, `1`, `5`, `...`, `100` is short for `"0"`, `"1-4"`, `"5-9"`, `...`, `"100+"`. `cleanAgeGroup` interprets a vector`age` as a set of age-group labels if the unique values from `age`, once sorted, form a sequence, `0, 5, 10, ...` or `0, 1, 5, 10, ...`.

`cleanAgeGroup` does the reformatting. `cleanAgeGroupConc` constructs a `{Concordance}` between the old and new age-group labels.

`cleanAgeGroup` is suitable for interactive use, or for one-off analyses, where the data will not change in future.

Using `cleanAgeGroupConc` may be safer in production code where the data may change. The workflow is as follows:

1. Use a vector of age labels to construct a concordance.

2. Store the concordance.

3. When new data arrives, use function `translate`, plus the stored concordance, to clean the age data.

The advantange of this work flow is that `translate` will throw an error if it strikes an age label that it does not recognize.

### Value

A character vector of reformatted age labels.

### See Also

`ageToAgeGroup` converts exact ages into age groups.

### Examples

    x1 <- c("0 - 4 years", "90 plus years", "25 - 29 years")
    x2 <- c("10 to 19 Yr", "80 years and over")
    x3 <- c(10, 0, 5, 1, 5)
    x4 <- c("5--9", "10plus", "0--4")
    x5 <- c("10plus", "10plus", "5--9", "5--9")

    ## Use cleanAgeGroup directly
    cleanAgeGroup(x1)
    cleanAgeGroup(x2)
    cleanAgeGroup(x3)

    ## Set up concordance and use that
    conc <- cleanAgeGroupConc(x4)
    translate(x5, concordance = conc)

[Package dembase version 0.0.0.119 Index]