cursory

The goal of cursory is to make it easier to summarize data and look at your variables. It builds off dplyr and purrr. It is also compatible with dbplyr and remote data.

Installation

You can install the released version of cursory from CRAN with:

install.packages("cursory")

And the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("halpo/cursory")

Example

This is a basic example which shows you how to solve a common problem:

library(dplyr)
library(cursory)
data(iris)

## basic summary statistics for each variable in a data frame.
cursory_all(group_by(iris, Species), lst(mean, median)) %>% ungroup() 

Variable	Species	mean	median
Sepal.Length	setosa	5.006	5.00
Sepal.Length	versicolor	5.936	5.90
Sepal.Length	virginica	6.588	6.50
Sepal.Width	setosa	3.428	3.40
Sepal.Width	versicolor	2.770	2.80
Sepal.Width	virginica	2.974	3.00
Petal.Length	setosa	1.462	1.50
Petal.Length	versicolor	4.260	4.35
Petal.Length	virginica	5.552	5.55
Petal.Width	setosa	0.246	0.20
Petal.Width	versicolor	1.326	1.30
Petal.Width	virginica	2.026	2.00

## summary statistics for only numeric variables. 
cursory_if(iris, is.numeric, lst(Mean = mean, 'Std. Deviation' = sd))

Variable	Mean	Std. Deviation
Sepal.Length	5.843333	0.8280661
Sepal.Width	3.057333	0.4358663
Petal.Length	3.758000	1.7652982
Petal.Width	1.199333	0.7622377

## summary statistics for specific variables. 
cursory_at(iris, vars(ends_with("Length")), var)

Variable	var
Sepal.Length	0.6856935
Petal.Length	3.1162779

table_1

The cursory package also provides a table_1 function that allows for describing variables of a dataset for different subsets automatically. This is useful in creating the very common demographics “table 1”.

table_1(iris, Species)

Variable	Level	(All)	setosa	versicolor	virginica
Sepal.Length	Min	4.300	4.300	4.900	4.900
	Median	5.800	5.000	5.900	6.500
	Mean	5.843	5.006	5.936	6.588
	Max	7.900	5.800	7.000	7.900
	SD	0.828	0.352	0.516	0.636
Sepal.Width	Min	2.000	2.300	2.000	2.200
	Median	3.000	3.400	2.800	3.000
	Mean	3.057	3.428	2.770	2.974
	Max	4.400	4.400	3.400	3.800
	SD	0.436	0.379	0.314	0.322
Petal.Length	Min	1.000	1.000	3.000	4.500
	Median	4.300	1.500	4.300	5.500
	Mean	3.758	1.462	4.260	5.552
	Max	6.900	1.900	5.100	6.900
	SD	1.765	0.174	0.470	0.552
Petal.Width	Min	0.100	0.100	1.000	1.400
	Median	1.300	0.200	1.300	2.000
	Mean	1.199	0.246	1.326	2.026
	Max	2.500	0.600	1.800	2.500
	SD	0.762	0.105	0.198	0.275

The table_1() function also tags the Variable column as a dontrepeat class column which make repeating values in columns not appear when formatted, so that tables are easier to read.