Factors

Introduction

In the previous post, we learnt about dataframes. In this post, we will learn about factors.

• create factors
• order levels
• specify labels
• check levels
• number of levels

Categorical or qualitative data in R is treated as data type factor.

Create Factors

args(factor)

## function (x = character(), levels, labels = levels, exclude = NA, 
##     ordered = is.ordered(x), nmax = NA) 
## NULL

devices <- factor(c('Mobile', 'Tablet', 'Desktop'))
devices

## [1] Mobile  Tablet  Desktop
## Levels: Desktop Mobile Tablet

# number of levels
nlevels(devices)

## [1] 3

# levels
levels(devices)

## [1] "Desktop" "Mobile"  "Tablet"

We will learn more about factors in a later post.