On 09/09/11 11:36, Totally Inept wrote:
First of all, let me apologize, as this is probably an absurdly basic
question. I did search before asking, but perhaps my ineptitude didn't allow
me to apply what I read to what I'm doing. Totally new to R, and haven't
done any code in any language in a long time.
Basically I've got categories. They're department codes for doctors (say,
9999 for radiology or 5555 for endocrinology), which of course means that
there are a good number of them, i.e. it's not practical for me to write
them all out as I usually see in examples of categorical variables
(factors).
And then I've got a list of doctors that I'm actually interested in. I have
the department codes associated with each, but I need to map the department
name to the doctor name. So I might have Greg Jones, Bob Smith, Tom Wilson,
etc... to go with 1234, 9999, 2222, etc.
I need to turn Greg Jones, Bob Smith, ... and 1234, 9999, ... into Greg
Jones, Bob Smith, ... Cardiology, Radiology, ....
Obviously I could just search and replace within the csv files but I need
something durable that I can run things through repeatedly.
Anyhow, thanks to anyone willing to humor me with an answer.
Not really clear what your problem is .... I *think* that you just want
to re-code the department codes to their comprehensible name
equivalents. You can indeed do this using factors.
Suppose that you have your data in a data frame "X", with columns
"doctor" and "department". You want to recode "department".
You can do something like:
X$department <- factor(X$department,levels=c(1234,9999,2222,<whatever>),
labels=c("Cardiology","Radiology","IngrownToenails",<whatever>))
Given that there are a large number of departments you may well want to
put the appropriate command into a text file and source() that file.
Or you may find it more convenient to use the recode() function from the
"car"
package.
HTH
cheers,
Rolf Turner
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