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Automatic correlations

Source: R/auto.correlate.R
auto.correlate.Rd

This wrapper is similar to cor_auto. There are some minor adjustments that make this function simpler and to function within EGAnet. NA values are not treated as categories (this behavior differs from cor_auto)

Usage

auto.correlate(
  data,
  corr = c("cosine", "kendall", "pearson", "spearman"),
  ordinal.categories = 7,
  forcePD = TRUE,
  na.data = c("pairwise", "listwise"),
  empty.method = c("none", "zero", "all"),
  empty.value = c("none", "point_five", "one_over"),
  verbose = FALSE,
  ...
)

Arguments

data

Matrix or data frame. Should consist only of variables to be used in the analysis

corr

Character (length = 1). The standard correlation method to be used. Defaults to "pearson". Using "pearson" will compute polychoric, tetrachoric, polyserial, and biserial correlations for categorical and categorical/continuous correlations by default. To obtain "pearson" correlations regardless, use cor. Other options of "kendall" and "spearman" are provided for completeness and use cor. cosine is also available

ordinal.categories

Numeric (length = 1). Up to the number of categories before a variable is considered continuous. Defaults to 7 categories before 8 is considered continuous

forcePD

Boolean (length = 1). Whether positive definite matrix should be enforced. Defaults to TRUE

na.data

Character (length = 1). How should missing data be handled? Defaults to "pairwise". Available options:

  • "pairwise" — Computes correlation for all available cases between two variables

  • "listwise" — Computes correlation for all complete cases in the dataset

empty.method

Character (length = 1). Method for empty cell correction in polychoric.matrix. Defaults to "none" Available options:

  • "none" — Adds no value (empty.value = "none") to the empirical joint frequency table between two variables

  • "zero" — Adds empty.value to the cells with zero in the joint frequency table between two variables

  • "all" — Adds empty.value to all in the joint frequency table between two variables

empty.value

Character (length = 1). Value to add to the joint frequency table cells in polychoric.matrix. Defaults to "none". Accepts numeric values between 0 and 1 or specific methods:

  • "none" — Adds no value (0) to the empirical joint frequency table between two variables

  • "point_five" — Adds 0.5 to the cells defined by empty.method

  • "one_over" — Adds 1 / n where n equals the number of cells based on empty.method. For empty.method = "zero", n equals the number of zero cells

verbose

Boolean (length = 1). Whether messages should be printed. Defaults to FALSE

...

Not actually used but makes it easier for general functionality in the package

Author

Alexander P. Christensen <alexpaulchristensen@gmail.com>

Examples

# Load data
wmt <- wmt2[,7:24]

# Obtain correlations
wmt_corr <- auto.correlate(wmt)