What's a factor and why would you use it?

In this chapter 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. (You will see later why this is the case.)

A good example of a categorical variable is the variable 'Gender'. A human individual can either be "Male" or "Female", making abstraction of inter-sexes. So here "Male" and "Female" are, in a simplified sense, the two values of the categorical variable "Gender", and every observation can be assigned to either the value "Male" of "Female".

Instructions

Assign to variable theory the value "factors for categorical variables".

Take Hint (-30xp)