How to create a data group (factor variables) in my dataframe based on categorical variables #R - r

Question

I want to create a factor variables in my dataframes based on categorical variables.
My data:
# A tibble: 159 x 3
name.country gpd rate_suicide
<chr> <dbl> <dbl>
1 Afghanistan 2129. 6.4
2 Albania 12003. 5.6
3 Algeria 11624. 3.3
4 Angola 7103. 8.9
5 Antigua and Barbuda 19919. 0.5
6 Argentina 20308. 9.1
7 Armenia 10704. 5.7
8 Australia 47350. 11.7
9 Austria 52633. 11.4
10 Azerbaijan 14371. 2.6
# ... with 149 more rows
I want to create factor variable region, which contains a factors as:
region <- c('Asian', 'Europe', 'South America', 'North America', 'Africa')
region = factor(region, levels = c('Asian', 'Europe', 'South America', 'North America', 'Africa'))
I want to do this with dplyr packages, that can to choose a factor levels depends on name.countrybut it doesn't work. Example:
if (new_data$name.country[new_data$name.country == "N"]) {
mutate(new_data, region_ = region[1])
}
How i can solve the problem?

Answer 1

I think the way I would think about your problem is
Create a reproducible problem. (see How to make a great R reproducible example. ) Since you already have the data, use dput to make it easier for people like me to recreate your data in their environment.
dput(yourdf)
structure(list(name.country = c("Afghanistan", "Albania", "Algeria"
), gpd = c(2129L, 12003L, 11624L), rate_suicide = c(6.4, 5.6,
3.3)), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -3L))
raw_data<-structure(list(name.country = c("Afghanistan", "Albania", "Algeria"
), gpd = c(2129L, 12003L, 11624L), rate_suicide = c(6.4, 5.6,
3.3)), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -3L))
Define vectors that specify your regions
Use case_when to separate countries into regions
Use as.factor to convert your character variable to a factor
asia=c("Afghanistan","India","...","Rest of countries in Asia")
europe=c("Albania","France","...","Rest of countries in Europe")
africa=c("Algeria","Egypt","...","Rest of countries in Africa")
df<-raw_data %>%
mutate(region=case_when(
name.country %in% asia ~ "asia",
name.country %in% europe ~ "europe",
name.country %in% africa ~ "africa",
TRUE ~ "other"
)) %>%
mutate(region=region %>% as.factor())
You can check that your variable region is a factor using str
str(df)
'data.frame': 3 obs. of 4 variables:
$ name.country: chr "Afghanistan" "Albania" "Algeria"
$ gpd : int 2129 12003 11624
$ rate_suicide: num 6.4 5.6 3.3
$ region : Factor w/ 3 levels "africa","asia",..: 2 3 1

Answer 2

Here is a working example that combines data from the question with a file of countries and region information from Github. H/T to Luke Duncalfe for maintaining the region data, which is:
...a combination of the Wikipedia ISO-3166 article for alpha and numeric country codes and the UN Statistics site for countries' regional and sub-regional codes.
regionFile <- "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lukes/ISO-3166-Countries-with-Regional-Codes/master/all/all.csv"
regionData <- read.csv(regionFile,header=TRUE)
textFile <- "rowID|country|gdp|suicideRate
1|Afghanistan|2129.|6.4
2|Albania|12003.|5.6
3|Algeria|11624.|3.3
4|Angola|7103.|8.9
5|Antigua and Barbuda|19919.|0.5
6|Argentina|20308.|9.1
7|Armenia|10704.|5.7
8|Australia|47350.|11.7
9|Austria|52633.|11.4
10|Azerbaijan|14371.|2.6"
data <- read.csv(text=textFile,sep="|")
library(dplyr)
data %>%
left_join(.,regionData,by = c("country" = "name"))
...and the output:
rowID country gdp suicideRate alpha.2 alpha.3 country.code
1 1 Afghanistan 2129 6.4 AF AFG 4
2 2 Albania 12003 5.6 AL ALB 8
3 3 Algeria 11624 3.3 DZ DZA 12
4 4 Angola 7103 8.9 AO AGO 24
5 5 Antigua and Barbuda 19919 0.5 AG ATG 28
6 6 Argentina 20308 9.1 AR ARG 32
7 7 Armenia 10704 5.7 AM ARM 51
8 8 Australia 47350 11.7 AU AUS 36
9 9 Austria 52633 11.4 AT AUT 40
10 10 Azerbaijan 14371 2.6 AZ AZE 31
iso_3166.2 region sub.region intermediate.region
1 ISO 3166-2:AF Asia Southern Asia
2 ISO 3166-2:AL Europe Southern Europe
3 ISO 3166-2:DZ Africa Northern Africa
4 ISO 3166-2:AO Africa Sub-Saharan Africa Middle Africa
5 ISO 3166-2:AG Americas Latin America and the Caribbean Caribbean
6 ISO 3166-2:AR Americas Latin America and the Caribbean South America
7 ISO 3166-2:AM Asia Western Asia
8 ISO 3166-2:AU Oceania Australia and New Zealand
9 ISO 3166-2:AT Europe Western Europe
10 ISO 3166-2:AZ Asia Western Asia
region.code sub.region.code intermediate.region.code
1 142 34 NA
2 150 39 NA
3 2 15 NA
4 2 202 17
5 19 419 29
6 19 419 5
7 142 145 NA
8 9 53 NA
9 150 155 NA
10 142 145 NA
At this point one can decide whether to use the region, sub region, or intermediate region and convert it to a factor.
We can set region to a factor by adding a mutate() function to the dplyr pipeline:
data %>%
left_join(.,regionData,by = c("country" = "name")) %>%
mutate(region = factor(region)) -> mergedData
At this point mergedData$region is a factor.
str(mergedData$region)
table(mergedData$region)
> str(mergedData$region)
Factor w/ 5 levels "Africa","Americas",..: 3 4 1 1 2 2 3 5 4 3
> table(mergedData$region)
Africa Americas Asia Europe Oceania
2 2 3 2 1
Now the data is ready for further analysis. We will generate a table of average suicide rates by region.
library(knitr) # for kable
mergedData %>% group_by(region) %>%
summarise(suicideRate = mean(suicideRate)) %>%
kable(.)
...and the output:
|region | suicideRate|
|:--------|-----------:|
|Africa | 6.1|
|Americas | 4.8|
|Asia | 4.9|
|Europe | 8.5|
|Oceania | 11.7|
When rendered in an HTML / markdown viewer, the result looks like this: