Factors in R

Learn about factor objects in R and their use cases.

The factor data type

Factors are beneficial when we store data as categorical variables and construct a hierarchical structure among values. The classical use case for factor data is when values in a dataset are duplicated many times, and there are a limited number of unique values.

Here is an example:

c('Small', 'Big',' Medium', 'Small', 'Big', 'Small', 'Big', 'Medium', 'Big') 
# or 
c(2,3,2,1,1,3,1,1,3,2,3,2) 

Create factors

The factor() function converts containers into factor ...