Hi Bill -
Thanks so much! This was actually a great help, and problem worked out.
Cheers,
Andy
On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 4:23 PM, William Dunlap <wdunlap at tibco.com> wrote:
You may have read in your data incorrectly - a column you expected to be
numeric was not recognized as such so it was read in a character and then
converted to a 'factor'.
FAQ 7.10 tells how to work around the problem
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#How-do-I-convert-factors-to-numeric_003f
but a better solution is to repeatedly call read.table with various
parameters (esp. colClasses=c(...), header=TRUE/FALSE, dec=","/".",
stringsAsFactors=FALSE) until str(yourData) shows you that all the column
types are what you expect.
It is a waste of time to do much of anything with your data until
str(yourData) and some simple plots of it show you that it was read into R
correctly.
Bill Dunlap
TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com
On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 12:01 PM, Andy Schneider <
andyschneider85 at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi -
I'm trying to plot some data and having a lot of trouble! I have a simple
dataset consisting of two columns - income_per_capita and
mass_beauty_value.
When I read the data in and plot it, I get the attached plot Mass Beauty
Non-Numeric:
<http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/file/n4716202/Mass_Beauty_Non-Numeric.jpg>
.
You can see that, while it contains all the values, the income_per_capita
axis is out of order and there are some weird vertical lines happening.
To fix this, I converted both columns to numerics using:
mass_beauty$income_per_capita <-
as.numeric(mass_beauty$income_per_capita)
mass_beauty$mass_beauty_value <-
as.numeric(mass_beauty$mass_beauty_value)
When I did this, I noticed that my income_per_capita column's values
suddenly changed. Whereas I have values extending all the way to 30,000
or
so before, now they maxed out at around 1,400. While at first I thought
they
might at least have changed to scale, it unfortunately looks like changes
were more or less random. But, they plotted much better:
<http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/file/n4716202/Mass_Beauty_Plot.jpg> .
Does anyone have any solution for how I can convert my income_per_capita
column to a plottable numeric without changing up its values? I've tried
doing as.numeric(as.character(mass_beauty_value$income_per_capita)) but
it
didn't work.
Thanks so much for your help!