Reorder coefficients by regex

[zauster]

Allow coefficients to be re-ordered by a vector of regex:

Eg:
reorder.coef = c("^log", "^GDP", "^Population")
would put all coefficients that start with "log" on top, then "GDP" and then "Population" coefficients.

Motivation: I routinely have model with some fixed effects and interactions, then I would have to calculate the number of created dummy variables and based on these I could reorder them.

[Irazall]

I would like to see this as well :)

[leifeld]

I'd be open to a pull request if anyone wants to give it a try. The relevant code fragments are the reorder function, potentially the lines in the texreg, screenreg etc functions that call the reorder function, and two places in the plotreg function, which handles reordering in a different way, I think.

[czucca]

Yes, plotreg has its own way of reordering. I confirm that.

[maifeng]

For those interested in re-ordering variable names based on regular expression patterns, here is a workaround.

# Assume you have a list of models
models <- list(model1, model2, model3)

# Extract all unique var names from the models
all_names <- unique(unlist(lapply(models, function(model) names(coef(model)))))

regex_patterns <- c("^log", "^GDP", "^Population")

ordered_indices <- c()
matched <- rep(FALSE, length(all_names))

# Loop through each regex pattern and find matching indices
for (pattern in regex_patterns) {
    # Find indices that match the current pattern and have not been matched yet
    current_indices <- which(grepl(pattern, all_names) & !matched)

    # Append these indices to the ordered_indices
    ordered_indices <- c(ordered_indices, current_indices)

    # Mark these indices as matched
    matched[current_indices] <- TRUE
}

# Add any remaining indices that do not match any pattern
remaining_indices <- which(!matched)
ordered_indices <- c(ordered_indices, remaining_indices)

screenreg(models, reorder.coef = ordered_indices)

[maifeng]

I can submit a pull request when I test the implementation a bit more. See
master...maifeng:texreg:coef_reorder

@leifeld Is it ok if I implement it to so that reorder.coef can also take a vector of regular expressions as input? I won't touch plotreg for now.

[leifeld]

@maifeng Thanks, this looks useful. I would be happy to see a pull request, provided you can also do the following:

• Move your function to the appropriate place in the file, after the reorder function.
• Make sure this also works for plotreg. Liaise with @czucca, who wrote the plotreg function, if necessary.
• Ensure nothing else breaks, and fix any issues in the GitHub Action workflows that may arise. (These are typically reported in the pull request.)
• Add a testthat unit test that checks if the code does what it's supposed to do. This will ensure we don't break it by accident with future revisions.
• Increment the version number to 1.39.5.