Tools for Descriptive Statistics and Exploratory Data Analysis

DescTools is an extensive collection of miscellaneous basic statistics functions and comfort wrappers not available in the R basic system for efficient description of data. The author’s intention was to create a toolbox, which facilitates the (notoriously time consuming) first descriptive tasks in data analysis, consisting of calculating descriptive statistics, drawing graphical summaries and reporting the results. The package contains furthermore functions to produce documents using MS Word (or PowerPoint) and functions to import data from Excel.

A considerable part of the included functions can be found scattered in other packages and other sources written partly by Titans of R. The reason for collecting them here, was primarily to have them consolidated in ONE instead of dozens of packages (which themselves might depend on other packages, which are not needed at all), and to provide a common and consistent interface as far as function and arguments naming, NA handling, recycling rules etc. are concerned. Google style guides were used as naming rules (in absence of convincing alternatives). The ‘CamelStyle’ was consequently applied to functions borrowed from contributed R packages as well.

Feedback, feature requests, bug reports and other suggestions are welcome! Please report problems to GitHub issues tracker (preferred), Stack Overflow mentioning DescTools or directly to the maintainer.

Installation

You can install the released version of DescTools from CRAN with:

install.packages("DescTools")

And the development version from GitHub with:

if (!require("remotes")) install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("AndriSignorell/DescTools")

Warning

Warning: This package is still under development. Although the code seems meanwhile quite stable, until release of version 1.0 you should be aware that everything in the package might be subject to change. Backward compatibility is not yet guaranteed. Functions may be deleted or renamed and new syntax may be inconsistent with earlier versions. By release of version 1.0 the “deprecated-defunct process” will be installed.

MS-Office

To make use of MS-Office features, you must have Office in one of its variants installed. All Wrd*, XL* and Pp* functions require the package RDCOMClient to be installed as well. Hence the use of these functions is restricted to Windows systems. RDCOMClient can be installed with:

install.packages("RDCOMClient", repos="http://www.omegahat.net/R")

The omegahat repository does not benefit from the same update service as CRAN. So you may be forced to install a package compiled with an earlier version, which usually is not a problem. Use e.g. for R 3.6.x/R 4.0.x:

url <- "http://www.omegahat.net/R/bin/windows/contrib/3.5.1/RDCOMClient_0.93-0.zip"
url <- "http://www.omegahat.net/R/bin/windows/contrib/4.0/RDCOMClient_0.94-0.zip"
install.packages(url, repos = NULL, type = "binary")

RDCOMClient does not exist for Mac or Linux, sorry.

Authors

Andri Signorell
Helsana Versicherungen AG, Health Sciences, Zurich
HWZ University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration Zurich.

R is a community project. This can be seen from the fact that this package includes R source code and/or documentation previously published by various authors and contributors. Special thanks go to Beat Bruengger, Mathias Frueh, Daniel Wollschlaeger for their valuable contributions and testing. The good things come from all these guys, any problems are likely due to my tweaking. Thank you all!

Maintainer: Andri Signorell

Examples

library(DescTools)

demo(describe, package = "DescTools")

demo(plots, package = "DescTools")