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Automatically expanding an R factor into a collection of 1/0 indicator variables for every factor level

Asked 2011-02-19T03:23:58.627
119

I have an R data frame containing a factor that I want to "expand" so that for each factor level, there is an associated column in a new data frame, which contains a 1/0 indicator. E.g., suppose I have: 

df.original <-data.frame(eggs = c("foo", "foo", "bar", "bar"), ham = c(1,2,3,4))

I want: 

df.desired  <- data.frame(foo = c(1,1,0,0), bar=c(0,0,1,1), ham=c(1,2,3,4))

Because for certain analyses for which you need to have a completely numeric data frame (e.g., principal component analysis), I thought this feature might be built in. Writing a function to do this shouldn't be too hard, but I can foresee some challenges relating to column names and if something exists already, I'd rather use that.

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2 Answers

18

If your data frame is only made of factors (or you are working on a subset of variables which are all factors), you can also use the acm.disjonctif function from the ade4 package :

R> library(ade4)
R> df <-data.frame(eggs = c("foo", "foo", "bar", "bar"), ham = c("red","blue","green","red"))
R> acm.disjonctif(df)
  eggs.bar eggs.foo ham.blue ham.green ham.red
1        0        1        0         0       1
2        0        1        1         0       0
3        1        0        0         1       0
4        1        0        0         0       1

Not exactly the case you are describing, but it can be useful too...

answered 2011-02-19T12:49:54.247
4

Just came across this old thread and thought I'd add a function that utilizes ade4 to take a dataframe consisting of factors and/or numeric data and returns a dataframe with factors as dummy codes.

dummy <- function(df) {  

    NUM <- function(dataframe)dataframe[,sapply(dataframe,is.numeric)]
    FAC <- function(dataframe)dataframe[,sapply(dataframe,is.factor)]

    require(ade4)
    if (is.null(ncol(NUM(df)))) {
        DF <- data.frame(NUM(df), acm.disjonctif(FAC(df)))
        names(DF)[1] <- colnames(df)[which(sapply(df, is.numeric))]
    } else {
        DF <- data.frame(NUM(df), acm.disjonctif(FAC(df)))
    }
    return(DF)
}

Let's try it.

df <-data.frame(eggs = c("foo", "foo", "bar", "bar"), 
            ham = c("red","blue","green","red"), x=rnorm(4))     
dummy(df)

df2 <-data.frame(eggs = c("foo", "foo", "bar", "bar"), 
            ham = c("red","blue","green","red"))  
dummy(df2)
answered 2011-10-30T04:38:40.933

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