Changing factor to numeric
From ?factor: The interpretation of a factor depends on both the codes and the "levels" attribute. Be careful only to compare factors with the same set of levels (in the same order). In particular, as.numeric applied to a factor is meaningless, and may happen by implicit coercion. To transform a factor f to its original numeric values, as.numeric(levels(f))[f] is recommended and slightly more efficient than as.numeric(as.character(f)). Uwe Ligges
ojal john owino wrote:
Dear Users, I have a variable in my dataset which is of type factor. But it actually contains numeric entries which like 5.735 4.759 ..... This is because the data was read from a CSV file into R and this variable contained other charaters which were not numeric. I have now dropped the records with the characters which are not numeric for this variable and want to change it to numeric srotage type. I have tried using as.numeric() function but it changes the values in the variable to what I think are the ranks of the individual values of the varible in the dataset. For example if 5.735 is the current content in the field, then the new object created by as.numeric will contain a value like 680 if the 5.735 was the highest value for the varible and the dataset had 680 records. How can I change the storage type without changing the contents of this variable in this case? Thanks for your consideration.