Store set of categories in CategoricalVariable

[slwu89]

I think it might be a good idea to store the set of valid states within CategoricalVariable. I have a use case where I'll need multiple categorical variables and having each object know its set of valid states makes rendering output easier. I'm considering writing a rendering prefab to take in an indeterminate number of categorical variables to output counts of each, which would be greatly eased by storing states within the variables (for outputting the marginals or intersections).

[giovannic]

This feels quite related to #47

Is it a duplicate?

Deffo needed

[slwu89]

Ah, even more simple, just adding a value to CategoricalVariable that stores the unique categories (passed as argument categories in the constructor).

[giovannic]

Ah ok, but then how do we initialise individuals who have more than one category?

[slwu89]

Oh, this isn't touching issue #47. This one would be as simple as adding a line like:

self$.categories <- categories

to CategoricalVariable$initialize. I just opened an issue for it because I was wanted to make sure this doesn't go against some design philosophy I'm not aware of. It's probably superfluous to have opened an entire issue for such a small change...

[giovannic]

Oh I seeeee!

Yes that would be useful.

self$.categories <- categories

would not be DRY.

A bitset_get_categories function that gets the categories from the C++ class is the principled way to do it

[slwu89]

Cool =] So it was a good idea to check.

Yeah I mostly wanted it so I can do something like this to get marginal counts, or something more elegant to get the cross tabulation table of counts. I see now how it originally came across as being similar to #47

render_multiple_categorical_variables <- function(renderer, ...) {
  vars <- match.call(expand.dots = FALSE)$`...`
   function(t) {
    for( v in vars) {
       for (c in v$get_categories()) {
          renderer$render(paste0(v,"_",c, '_count'), v$get_size_of(c), t)
       }
    }
  }
}