Matching with string distance has never been easier! 'messy.cats' contains various functions that employ string distance tools in order to make data management easier for users working with categorical data. Categorical data, especially user inputted categorical data that often tends to be plagued by typos, can be difficult to work with. 'messy.cats' aims to provide functions that make cleaning categorical data simple and easy.
The goal of messy.cats is to make cleaning messy categorical easier. User inputted character categorical data often suffers from messiness than can be complicated and time consuming to clean up. When inputting data, users often make typos or formatting errors than cause stubborn, hard to detect issues in their data. By leveraging string distance measurement tools, messy.cats allows users to automate many of the steps involved with cleaning categorical data. This enables users to spend less time fiddling around with inconsistent categorical data with less effort.
You can install the released version of messy.cats from GITHUB with:
if(!require(devtools)){
install.packages("devtools")
}
devtools::install_github("hkarp1/messy.cats")
This is a basic example which shows you how to solve a common problem:
library(messy.cats)
plant_categories = c("tree", "bush", "herb", "grass")
messy_plant_categories = c("green tree", "red bush", "new herb", "old grass", "young tree", "small bush", "20 herbs", "the grass", "a tree",
"bushes", "herbs", "tall grass")
cat_match(plant_categories, messy_plant_categories)