Understanding Factors

Factors in R are used to store categorical data, where the data can be divided into a finite number of categories, called levels. For instance, a factor could represent the categories “low”, “medium”, and “high”. Internally, R stores these categories as integers (1, 2, 3, etc.), but it also maintains a mapping of these integers to the actual category labels.

categories <- factor(c(“low”, “medium”, “high”, “medium”, “low”))

In this example, categories is a factor with three levels: “low”, “medium”, and “high”. Internally, R might represent these levels as 1, 2, and 3.

In R Programming Language factors are used to represent categorical data. However, there are situations where converting a factor to an integer or numeric type is necessary, especially when performing numerical computations. This conversion must be done carefully to avoid any loss of information. This article will guide you through the process of converting a factor to an integer or numeric type without losing the information encoded in the factor levels.