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rstudiorevolution-r

rxCrossTabs crashes on a character variable

When I run this in Revolution R Enterprise, it totally crashes Rstudio on the last line:

require(RevoScaleR)
set.seed(1)
a = sample(c("happy", "sad", "other", NA), 100, replace = TRUE)
y = data.frame(a)
y$a = as.character(y$a)
rxCrossTabs(1 ~ a, data = y)

This seems buggy to me. Shouldn't it at least throw a warning and return me the command prompt?

The quick fix above is to simply exclude the line y$a = as.character(y$a), but I'd rather really understand what is going on. I'm having the same sort of crash with rxCrossTabs when I try to run it on a .xdf file, and I wonder if it is a related issue. I.e., perhaps somehow R is reading in a column of the file as character only instead of as factor, but I'm not sure how to investigate that directly.

Solution

  • This is not a Revolution R problem; it's an Rstudio problem. If I run your code in R in a terminal session, it does not crash, but it does throw an error message that Rstudio should have relayed to you:

    enter image description here

    Evidently your challenge now is to figure out how to put the right variable type on each column of interest in your .xdf file. Specifically, you need to have a factor variable to use the rxCrossTabs function.