The goal of this tutorial is to change all column types to factor in a single command.
# First of all we load the data
# For this tutorial we are going to use the iris plant dataset
data(iris)
str(iris)## 'data.frame': 150 obs. of 5 variables:
## $ Sepal.Length: num 5.1 4.9 4.7 4.6 5 5.4 4.6 5 4.4 4.9 ...
## $ Sepal.Width : num 3.5 3 3.2 3.1 3.6 3.9 3.4 3.4 2.9 3.1 ...
## $ Petal.Length: num 1.4 1.4 1.3 1.5 1.4 1.7 1.4 1.5 1.4 1.5 ...
## $ Petal.Width : num 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.1 ...
## $ Species : Factor w/ 3 levels "setosa","versicolor",..: 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...# We create an index from 1 to number of columns of our dataset
index <- 1:ncol(iris)
iris[ , index] <- lapply(iris[ , index], as.factor)
str(iris)## 'data.frame': 150 obs. of 5 variables:
## $ Sepal.Length: Factor w/ 35 levels "4.3","4.4","4.5",..: 9 7 5 4 8 12 4 8 2 7 ...
## $ Sepal.Width : Factor w/ 23 levels "2","2.2","2.3",..: 15 10 12 11 16 19 14 14 9 11 ...
## $ Petal.Length: Factor w/ 43 levels "1","1.1","1.2",..: 5 5 4 6 5 8 5 6 5 6 ...
## $ Petal.Width : Factor w/ 22 levels "0.1","0.2","0.3",..: 2 2 2 2 2 4 3 2 2 1 ...
## $ Species : Factor w/ 3 levels "setosa","versicolor",..: 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...In this tutorial we have learnt how to change all columns at the same time to factors. This technique can be use to change a set of columns to any type.