Factors are variables in R which take on a limited number of different values; such variables are often referred to as categorical variables.
In a dataset, we can distinguish two types of variables: categorical and continuous.
In a categorical variable, the value is limited and usually based on a particular finite group. For example, a categorical variable can be countries, year, gender, occupation.
A continuous variable, however, can take any values, from integer to decimal. For example, we can have the revenue, price of a share, etc..
Categorical Variables
R stores categorical variables into a factor. Let's check the code below to convert a character variable into a factor variable. Characters are not supported in machine learning algorithm, and the only way is to convert a string to an integer.
Syntax
factor(x = character(), levels, labels = levels, ordered = is.ordered(x))
Arguments:
x: A vector of data. Need to be a string or integer, not decimal.
Levels: A vector of possible values taken by x. This argument is optional. The default value is the unique list of items of the vector x.
Labels: Add a label to the x data. For example, 1 can take the label `male` while 0, the label `female`.
ordered: Determine if the levels should be ordered.
Example:
Let's create a factor data frame.
# Create gender vector
gender_vector <- c("Male", "Female", "Female", "Male", "Male")
class(gender_vector)
# Convert gender_vector to a factor
factor_gender_vector <-factor(gender_vector)
class(factor_gender_vector)
Output:
## [1] "character"
## [1] "factor"
Ordinal Categorical Variable
Ordinal categorical variables do have a natural ordering. We can specify the order, from the lowest to the highest with order = TRUE and highest to lowest with order = FALSE.
Example:
We can use summary to count the values for each factor.
# Create Ordinal categorical vector
day_vector <- c('evening', 'morning', 'afternoon', 'midday', 'midnight', 'evening')
# Convert `day_vector` to a factor with ordered level
factor_day <- factor(day_vector, order = TRUE, levels =c('morning', 'midday', 'afternoon', 'evening', 'midnight'))
# Print the new variable
factor_day
Output:
## [1] evening morning afternoon midday
midnight evening
Continuous Variables
Continuous class variables are the default value in R. They are stored as numeric or integer. We can see it from the dataset below. mtcars is a built-in dataset. It gathers information on different types of car. We can import it by using mtcars and check the class of the variable mpg, mile per gallon. It returns a numeric value, indicating a continuous variable.
