Make quartiles/quintiles/deciles of variables

[shijiaSMH]

Motivation

Continuous variables are commonly needed to be broken down into quartiles/quintiles/deciles for descriptive analysis.

Skeleton code ideas

• level of cuts: quartiles/quintiles/deciles
• argument to control cuts: 4 for quartiles, 5 for quintiles; only numbers are allowed
• automatic adjustment: based on argument input, probs/labels automatically changed

Quartile ex code - quartiles

quartile <- function(x){
  cut(x, breaks = c(-Inf, quantile(x, probs = c(0.25, 0.5, 0.75)), Inf), labels = 1:4)
}

[loffleraSMH]

Can we make this function a bit more flexible to allow for creation of quintiles/deciles etc. as well? I.e., the function should accept an input (could be numeric, e.g., 4 for quartiles, 5 for quintiles etc.) and then the probs/labels are adjusted accordingly.

[shijiaSMH]

Thx Anne, your suggestion makes sense, quickly editing this issue right now :)