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Exercise

What's a factor and why would you use it? (2)

To create factors in R, you make use of the function factor(). First thing that you have to do is create a vector that contains all the observations that belong to a limited number of categories. For example, sex_vector contains the sex of 5 different individuals:

sex_vector <- c("Male","Female","Female","Male","Male")

It is clear that there are two categories, or in R-terms 'factor levels', at work here: "Male" and "Female".

The function factor() will encode the vector as a factor:

factor_sex_vector <- factor(sex_vector)

Instructions

100 XP
  • Convert the character vector sex_vector to a factor with factor() and assign the result to factor_sex_vector
  • Print out factor_sex_vector and assert that R prints out the factor levels below the actual values.