Dear Deepayan,
I do not have further suggestions, but I just wanted to thank you for taking
the time to improve the documentation so much! (and for adding support for
specifying "varying" as a vector)
Both "Typical usage" and the details are useful additions. Adding a vignette
also seems an excellent idea.
These changes will probably helps numerous users.
Best,
Thomas
On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 7:55 PM Michael Dewey <lists using dewey.myzen.co.uk>
wrote:
>
> Comments in line
>
> On 13/03/2021 09:50, SOEIRO Thomas wrote:
> > Dear list,
> >
> > I have some questions/suggestions about reshape.
> >
> > 1) I think a good amount of the popularity of base::reshape alternative is
> > due to the complexity of reshape documentation. It is quite hard (at least
> > it is for me) to figure out what argument is needed for respectively "long
> > to wide" and "wide to long", because reshapeWide and reshapeLong are
> > documented together.
> > - Do you agree with this?
> > - Would you consider a proposal to modify the documentation?
> > - If yes, what approach do you suggest? e.g. split in two pages?
>
> The current documentation is much clearer than it was when I first
> started using R but we should always strive for more.
>
> I would suggest leaving the documentation in one place but it might be
> helpful to add which direction is relevant for each parameter by placing
> (to wide) or (to long) as appropriate. I think having completely
> separate lists is not needed
I have just checked in some updates to the documentation (in R-devel)
which hopefully makes usage clearer. Any further suggestions are
welcome. We are planning to add a short vignette as well, hopefully in
time for R 4.1.0.
> > 2) I do not think the documentation indicates that we can use varying
> > argument to rename variables in reshapeWide.
> > - Is this worth documenting?
> > - Is the construct list(c()) really needed?
>
> Yes, because you may have more than one set of variables which need to
> correspond to a single variable in long format. So in your example if
> you also had 11 variables for the temperature as well as the
> concentration each would need specifying as a separate vector in the list.
That's a valid point, but on the other hand, direction="long" already
supports specifying 'varying' as a vector, and it does simplify the
single variable case. So we decided to be consistent and allow it for
direction="wide" too, hopefully with loud enough warnings in the
documentation about using the feature carelessly.
Best,
-Deepayan
> Michael
>
> >
> > reshape(Indometh,
> > v.names = "conc",
> > idvar = "Subject",
> > timevar = "time",
> > direction = "wide",
> > varying = list(c("conc_0.25hr",
> > "conc_0.5hr",
> > "conc.0.75hr",
> > "conc_1hr",
> > "conc_1.25hr",
> > "conc_2hr",
> > "conc_3hr",
> > "conc_4hr",
> > "conc_5hr",
> > "conc_6hr",
> > "conc_8hr")))
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Thomas
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >
>
> --
> Michael
> http://www.dewey.myzen.co.uk/home.html
>
> ______________________________________________
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