getCategories#

Purpose#

Returns the unique set of column labels for a categorical variable.

Format#

labels = getCategories(X[, columns])#

Parameters:

X (NxK dataframe) – Data with metadata.
columns (Scalar or string) – Optional argument, name or index of the categorical variable in X to get labels from. Must be specified if X contains more than one column. Default = 1.

Returns:

labels (Dataframe) – Categorical labels assigned to variables specified by columns.

Examples#

// Load data
fname = getGAUSSHome("examples/yarn.xlsx");
yarn = loadd(fname, "cat(yarn_length) + cat(amplitude) + cat(load) + cycles");

// Get column labels for yarn_length
labels = getCategories(yarn, "yarn_length");

print labels;

As we can see below, the variable name for the returned dataframe is “categories”.

categories
      high
       low
       med

The returned dataframe contains both the string labels and the key values. Some functions need a string array as input. You can convert labels to a string array with ntos():

// Convert to a string array
str_labels = ntos(labels);

print str_labels;

high
 low
 med

If you want to see the key values, you can use the asmatrix() function:

// Convert to a numeric matrix
// to see the key values
numeric_keys = asmatrix(labels);

print numeric_keys;

0
1
2