Regression stars

On Feb 12, 2013, at 17:05 , Brian Lee Yung Rowe wrote:

I thought that the default was the way it was for performance reasons. For large data.frames or repeated applications, using factors should be faster for non-trivial strings.

I think not. Historically, it's more like "In statistics we have two kinds of variables, numerical and categorical. OK, so we have the occasional truly character-type variables like name and address, let's handle those as a special case".

<sarcasm>

Since character vectors are sooooo bad and people use them where
they should instead use a factor, I propose to go all the way and
by adding the stringsAsFactors arg to character() too. That way
people are put on the right track from the very start.

</sarcasm>

No seriously, if my variable is categorical, it's already in a factor
and that's how I pass it to data.frame(). But if I have it in a
character vector, it's because that's how I want it. It's my choice.
How could anybody ever think that having data.frame() alter his/her
data is a good thing?

Please *remove* the stringsAsFactors arg of data.frame() in R 3.0.
You'll do a big favor to your user base.

Thanks,
H.

Herv? Pag?s

Program in Computational Biology
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