Factors

In this exercise you dive into the wonderful world of factors.

The term factor refers to a statistical data type used to store categorical variables. The difference between a categorical variable and a continuous variable is that a categorical variable can belong to a limited number of categories. A continuous variable, on the other hand, can correspond to an infinite number of values.

It is important that R knows whether it is dealing with a continuous or a categorical variable, as the statistical models you will develop in the future treat both types differently.

A good example of a categorical variable is the variable student_status. An individual can either be "student" or "not student". This means that "student" and "not student" are two values of the categorical variable student_status and every observation can be assigned one of these values. We can do this using the factor function.

Turn the vector student_status into a factor and put this in a variable called categorical_student
Print the variable categorical_student

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Exercise

Factors

Instructions