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rdataframecategorical-data
Donbeo
Donbeo

Reputation: 17617

How to check if a variable is categorical with R?

I have an R data frame and some of the variables are categorical. For example sex is "male" or "female" and "do you smoke" is 0 or 1. Others variables instead are continuous. I would like to know if there is any way to decide if a variable is categorical or not and in case compute its frequencies.

I think in my case a good test would be to check if the variable takes less than k=4 values.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 26275

Answers (2)

Ivor
Ivor

Reputation: 71

You can use class(dataframe$variable) to know the class of a variable within a data frame as well as determine whether the variable is a factor or not.

Upvotes: 3

Matthew Lundberg
Matthew Lundberg

Reputation: 42679

While you should use factors for categorical variables, you can find the unique values in a vector x with unique, and count them:

length(unique(x))

Upvotes: 5

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