[EXT] Re: Assigning categorical values to dates

On Wednesday, Jul 21, 2021 at 9:12 PM, Andrew Robinson <apro at unimelb.edu.au (mailto:apro at unimelb.edu.au)> wrote:
I wonder if you mean that you want the levels of the factor to reset within each month? That is not obvious from your example, but implied by your question.

Andrew


--
Andrew Robinson
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School/s of BioSciences and Mathematics & Statistics
University of Melbourne, VIC 3010 Australia
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Email: apro at unimelb.edu.au
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On 22 Jul 2021, 1:47 PM +1000, N. F. Parsons <nathan.f.parsons at gmail.com>, wrote:

External email: Please exercise caution

I am not averse to a factor-based solution, but I would still have to manually enter that factor each month, correct? If possible, I?d just like to point R at that column and have it do the work.

?
Nathan Parsons, B.SC, M.Sc, G.C.

Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of Sociology, Portland State University
Adjunct Professor, Dept. of Sociology, Washington State University
Graduate Advocate, American Association of University Professors (OR)

Recent work (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nathan_Parsons3/publications)
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On Wednesday, Jul 21, 2021 at 8:30 PM, Tom Woolman <twoolman at ontargettek.com (mailto:twoolman at ontargettek.com)> wrote:

Couldn't you convert the date columns to character type data in a data
frame, and then convert those strings to factors in a 2nd step?

The only downside I think to treating dates as factor levels is that
you might have an awful lot of factors if you have a large enough
dataset.



Quoting "N. F. Parsons" <nathan.f.parsons at gmail.com>:

Hi all,

If I have a tibble as follows:

tibble(dates = c(rep("2021-07-04", 2), rep("2021-07-25", 3),
rep("2021-07-18", 4)))

how in the world do I add a column that evaluates each of those dates and
assigns it a categorical value such that

dates cycle
<chr> <chr>
2021-07-04 1
2021-07-04 1
2021-07-25 3
2021-07-25 3
2021-07-25 3
2021-07-18 2
2021-07-18 2
2021-07-18 2
2021-07-18 2

Not to further complicate matters, but some months I may only have one
date, and some months I will have 4 dates - so thats not a fixed quantity.
We've literally been doing this by hand at my job and I'd like to automate
it.

Thanks in advance!

Nate Parsons

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