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boxuancui / DataExplorer

Automate Data Exploration and Treatment
http://boxuancui.github.io/DataExplorer/
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Include Date columns in histogram #143

Open leebrian opened 4 years ago

leebrian commented 4 years ago

Thanks for the package, it's really helpful in first round data exploration.

Would you please include Dates in the histogram portion of the profile?

Currently, only numerics are processed and are considered continuous in the plot_histogram function. But if Dates were considered continuous, or you were to explicitly add an option to configure to handle dates, they would be included in this section of the profile.

Currently dates are included in the bar chart section, but since they frequently have so many different values they are excluded. Also since dates are sequential the default bar chart sorting doesn't work as well as, I think, it's easier to view dates ordered by their date instead of most frequent.

boxuancui commented 4 years ago

Thanks for your suggestion. Dates are always tricky and subjective, and I do not have a plan yet to generalize date handling. However, have you tried setting dates as numerical values? For example: as.numeric(Sys.Date()) will turn dates into integers and be treated as continuous.

leebrian commented 4 years ago

Thanks, that does work and is what I do now. The challenge is that the profile is harder to understand as the time period is not as easy to understand, especially if there are different periods in the same dataset.