On Nov 7, 2012, at 3:07 PM, haps wrote: > I have a big dataset. I want to create a new factor variable with certain > conditions based on two existing numeric variables. > Existing variables: indinc (range: 0 to 16), groupinc (range -3 to 5) > Conditional values that 'incorp' will take: > If groupinc = 5, then ‘cons’; > If groupinc is -3 : -2, AND indinc < 9, then ‘ethnat’; > If groupinc is -2 : -1, AND indinc > 8, then ‘civic’; > If groupinc is 1 : 4, AND indinc > 8, then ‘libmul’; > The rest of the values should be coded as NA. > #here is my code after attaching the data (4408 is the number of > observations):# > incorp <-
You are making an inappropriate double assignment. This assignment will shoot off your foot. I believe that for loops return NULL, so even if your loop succeeded in making all the assignments inside the body which it did not and I believe could not even with syntactic surgery for the reason expanded on below, the incorp value would be NULL afterward. > incorp= 1:10; incorp <- for (i in seq_along(incorp) ) { incorp[i] = > 2*incorp[i] } > incorp NULL > for (i in 1:4408) { > if (groupinc[i] == 5) { > incorp[i] = 'cons' > } else if ((groupinc[i] == -3:-2) & (indinc[i] < 9)) { I doubt very much that you should be testing for (groupinc[i] == -3:-2) I suspect you what to be testing whether groupinc[i] is in the range -3 to -2 For that you have a couple of choices. If you know for a fact that groupinc[i] will be integer valued (and is not really a double/float value then you could do: if ( groupinc[i[ %in% -3:-2 ) If group inc[i] is a floating point number you should test: if( groupinc[i] >= -3 & groupinc[i] <= -2) > incorp[i] = 'ethnat' > } else if ((groupinc[i] == 1:4) & (indinc[i] > 8)) { > incorp[i] = 'libmul' > } else if ((groupinc[i] == -2:-1) & (indinc[i] > 8)) { > incorp[i] = 'civic' > } else = NA > } > #error message# > Error: unexpected '=' in: > " incorp[i] = 'civic' > } else =" That is a syntactic error, but I suspect you have semantic errors as mentioned above. > > > > -- > View this message in context: > http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/conditional-coding-question-tp4648801.html > Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. David Winsemius, MD Alameda, CA, USA ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.