On 11 Oct 2016, at 01:32 , S Ellison <s.elli...@lgcgroup.com> wrote:
>> Well, I think that's kind of overkill.
> Depends whether you want to recode all or some, and how robust you want the
> answer to be.
> recode() allows you to recode a few levels of many, without dependence on
> level ordering; that's kind of neat.
>
> tbh, though, I don't use recode() a lot; I generally find myself need to
> change a fair proportion of level labels.
>
> But I do get nervous about relying on specific ordering; it can break without
> visible warning if the data change (eg if you lose a factor level with a
> slightly different data set, integer indexing will give you apparently valid
> reassignment to the wrong new codes). So I tend to go via named vectors even
> if it costs me a lot of typing. For example to change
> lcase<-c('a', 'b', 'c')
>
> to c('B', 'A', 'C') I'll use something like
>
> c(a='B', b='A', c='C')[lcase]
>
> or, if lcase were a factor,
> c(a='B', b='A', c='C')[as.character(lcase)]
Notice that similar functionality is available via levels<-() (see help page
for more features)
> f <- factor(c("a","b","c"))
> levels(f) <- list(A="a", B="b", C="c")
> f
[1] A B C
Levels: A B C
The main advantage of this is that you control the level ordering, and also
that you don't quite as easily get caught out by unused levels:
> f <- factor(c("a","c"))
> levels(f) <- list(A="a", B="b", C="c")
> table(f)
f
A B C
1 0 1
(in which the 0 count might be important).
-pd
>
> Unlike using the numeric levels, that doesn't fail if some of the levels I
> expect are absent; it only fails (and does so visibly) when there's a value
> in there that I haven't assigned a coding to. So it's a tad more robust.
>
> Steve E
>
>
>
>
>
>
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--
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Office: A 4.23
Email: pd....@cbs.dk Priv: pda...@gmail.com
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