4.8 Explicit Coercion
Objects can be explicitly coerced from one class to another using the
as.*
functions, if available.
Code:
> x <- 0:6
> class(x)
[1] "integer"
> as.numeric(x)
[1] 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
> as.logical(x)
[1] FALSE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
> as.character(x)
[1] "0" "1" "2" "3" "4" "5" "6"
Sometimes, R can’t figure out how to coerce an object and this can result in
NA
s being produced.
Code:
> x <- c("a", "b", "c")
> as.numeric(x)
Warning: NAs introduced by coercion
[1] NA NA NA
> as.logical(x)
[1] NA NA NA
> as.complex(x)
Warning: NAs introduced by coercion
[1] NA NA NA
When nonsensical coercion takes place, you will usually get a warning from R.
4.9 Matrices
Matrices are vectors with a dimension attribute. The dimension attribute is itself an integer vector of length 2 (number of rows, number of columns)
Code:
> m <- matrix(nrow = 2, ncol = 3)
> m
[,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,] NA NA NA
[2,] NA NA NA
> dim(m)
[1] 2 3
> attributes(m)
$dim
[1] 2 3
Matrices are constructed column-wise, so entries can be thought of starting in the “upper left” corner and running down the columns.
Code:
> m <- matrix(1:6, nrow = 2, ncol = 3)
> m
[,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,] 1 3 5
[2,] 2 4 6
Matrices can also be created directly from vectors by adding a dimension attribute.
Code:
> m <- 1:10
> m
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
> dim(m) <- c(2, 5)
> m
[,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
[1,] 1 3 5 7 9
[2,] 2 4 6 8 10
Matrices can be created by column-binding or row-binding with the
cbind()
and rbind()
functions.
Code:
> x <- 1:3
> y <- 10:12
> cbind(x, y)
x y
[1,] 1 10
[2,] 2 11
[3,] 3 12
> rbind(x, y)
[,1] [,2] [,3]
x 1 2 3
y 10 11 12
4.10 Lists
Lists are a special type of vector that can contain elements of different classes. Lists are a very important data type in R and you should get to know them well. Lists, in combination with the various “apply” functions discussed later, make for a powerful combination.
Lists can be explicitly created using the
list()
function, which takes an arbitrary number of arguments.
Code:
> x <- list(1, "a", TRUE, 1 + 4i)
> x
[[1]]
[1] 1
[[2]]
[1] "a"
[[3]]
[1] TRUE
[[4]]
[1] 1+4i
We can also create an empty list of a prespecified length with the
vector()
function
Code:
> x <- vector("list", length = 5)
> x
[[1]]
NULL
[[2]]
NULL
[[3]]
NULL
[[4]]
NULL
[[5]]
NULL
4.11 Factors
Factors are used to represent categorical data and can be unordered or ordered. One can think of a factor as an integer vector where each integer has a label. Factors are important in statistical modeling and are treated specially by modelling functions like
lm()
and glm()
.Using factors with labels is better than using integers because factors are self-describing. Having a variable that has values “Male” and “Female” is better than a variable that has values 1 and 2.
Factor objects can be created with the
factor()
function.
Code:
> x <- factor(c("yes", "yes", "no", "yes", "no"))
> x
[1] yes yes no yes no
Levels: no yes
> table(x)
x
no yes
2 3
> ## See the underlying representation of factor
> unclass(x)
[1] 2 2 1 2 1
attr(,"levels")
[1] "no" "yes"
Often factors will be automatically created for you when you read a dataset in using a function like
read.table()
. Those functions often default to creating factors when they encounter data that look like characters or strings.The order of the levels of a factor can be set using the
levels
argument to factor()
. This can be important in linear modelling because the first level is used as the baseline level.
Code:
> x <- factor(c("yes", "yes", "no", "yes", "no"))
> x ## Levels are put in alphabetical order
[1] yes yes no yes no
Levels: no yes
> x <- factor(c("yes", "yes", "no", "yes", "no"),
+ levels = c("yes", "no"))
> x
[1] yes yes no yes no
Levels: yes no
4.12 Missing Values
Missing values are denoted by
NA
or NaN
for q undefined mathematical operations.
is.na()
is used to test objects if they areNA
is.nan()
is used to test forNaN
NA
values have a class also, so there are integerNA
, characterNA
, etc.
ANaN
value is alsoNA
but the converse is not true
Code:
> ## Create a vector with NAs in it
> x <- c(1, 2, NA, 10, 3)
> ## Return a logical vector indicating which elements are NA
> is.na(x)
[1] FALSE FALSE TRUE FALSE FALSE
> ## Return a logical vector indicating which elements are NaN
> is.nan(x)
[1] FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE
Code:
> ## Now create a vector with both NA and NaN values
> x <- c(1, 2, NaN, NA, 4)
> is.na(x)
[1] FALSE FALSE TRUE TRUE FALSE
> is.nan(x)
[1] FALSE FALSE TRUE FALSE FALSE
4.13 Data Frames
Data frames are used to store tabular data in R. They are an important type of object in R and are used in a variety of statistical modeling applications. Hadley Wickham’s package has an optimized set of functions designed to work efficiently with data frames.
Data frames are represented as a special type of list where every element of the list has to have the same length. Each element of the list can be thought of as a column and the length of each element of the list is the number of rows.
Unlike matrices, data frames can store different classes of objects in each column. Matrices must have every element be the same class (e.g. all integers or all numeric).
In addition to column names, indicating the names of the variables or predictors, data frames have a special attribute called
row.names
which indicate information about each row of the data frame.Data frames are usually created by reading in a dataset using the
read.table()
or read.csv()
. However, data frames can also be created explicitly with the data.frame()
function or they can be coerced from other types of objects like lists.Data frames can be converted to a matrix by calling
data.matrix()
. While it might seem that the as.matrix()
function should be used to coerce a data frame to a matrix, almost always, what you want is the result of data.matrix()
.
Code:
> x <- data.frame(foo = 1:4, bar = c(T, T, F, F))
> x
foo bar
1 1 TRUE
2 2 TRUE
3 3 FALSE
4 4 FALSE
> nrow(x)
[1] 4
> ncol(x)
[1] 2
4.14 Names
R objects can have names, which is very useful for writing readable code and self-describing objects. Here is an example of assigning names to an integer vector.
Code:
> x <- 1:3
> names(x)
NULL
> names(x) <- c("New York", "Seattle", "Los Angeles")
> x
New York Seattle Los Angeles
1 2 3
> names(x)
[1] "New York" "Seattle" "Los Angeles"
Lists can also have names, which is often very useful.
Code:
> x <- list("Los Angeles" = 1, Boston = 2, London = 3)
> x
$`Los Angeles`
[1] 1
$Boston
[1] 2
$London
[1] 3
> names(x)
[1] "Los Angeles" "Boston" "London"
Matrices can have both column and row names.
Code:
> m <- matrix(1:4, nrow = 2, ncol = 2)
> dimnames(m) <- list(c("a", "b"), c("c", "d"))
> m
c d
a 1 3
b 2 4
Column names and row names can be set separately using the
colnames()
and rownames()
functions.
Code:
> colnames(m) <- c("h", "f")
> rownames(m) <- c("x", "z")
> m
h f
x 1 3
z 2 4
Note that for data frames, there is a separate function for setting the row names, the
row.names()
function. Also, data frames do not have column names, they just have names (like lists). So to set the column names of a data frame just use the names()
function. Yes, I know its confusing. Here’s a quick summary:Object | Set column names | Set row names |
---|---|---|
data frame | names() | row.names() |
matrix | colnames() | rownames() |