On Oct 18, 2011, at 7:35 AM, Martin Batholdy wrote:
Dear R-list,
I currently have to convert a data.frame with several factor-
variables to a numeric matrix.
Now the problem is, that the order of the factor-labels don't match
the order I would like to use.
for example, let's assume I have this factor-variable in my data-
frame:
x <- factor(rep(1:4, 5), labels=c("slightly disagree", "disagree",
"agree", "slightly agree"))
Now I would like to convert this to a numeric vector so that
disagree == 1, slightly disagree == 2, slightly agree == 3, and
agree gets the value 4.
but as.numeric(x) just converts the factor levels to numerical
values according to their label-order.
Is there a convenient, flexible function that let's you control how
the factor-levels get converted to numerical values?
I think you want to first change the ordering of the levels and then
convert as desired.
> levels(x) <- c("slightly disagree", "disagree", "slightly agree",
"agree")
> x
[1] slightly disagree disagree slightly agree agree
[5] slightly disagree disagree slightly agree agree
[9] slightly disagree disagree slightly agree agree
[13] slightly disagree disagree slightly agree agree
[17] slightly disagree disagree slightly agree agree
Levels: slightly disagree disagree slightly agree agree
# Now choose hoe to convert
> as.numeric(x)
[1] 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
> as.character(x)
[1] "slightly disagree" "disagree" "slightly agree"
"agree"
[5] "slightly disagree" "disagree" "slightly agree"
"agree"
[9] "slightly disagree" "disagree" "slightly agree"
"agree"
[13] "slightly disagree" "disagree" "slightly agree" "agree"
[17] "slightly disagree" "disagree" "slightly agree" "agree"
thanks for any suggestions!
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West Hartford, CT
______________________________________________
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and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
