All values converted to NA while converting character to numeric - r

When I convert my data frame columns to numeric, all the values become NA
offense[,2:13] <- apply(offense[,2:13],2,as.numeric)
The converted data frame.
Dataframe before conversion.
They are all numbers no commas, I have even tried removing white spaces if there are any by chance by using
as.data.frame(apply(offense,2,function(x)gsub('\\s+','',x)))
but still the values are converted to NA on type conversion with a warning message.
I got the data from a URL (Data Science Cookbook chapter 3)
offense <- readHTMLTable(url, encoding = "UTF-8", colClasses="character")[[7]]

The imported variables are factors, so you have to use, e.g.
as.numeric(as.character(offense$`Pts/G`))
apply(offense[, 2:13], 2, function(x) as.numeric(as.character(x)))
See ?factor:
To transform a factor f to approximately its original numeric values,
as.numeric(levels(f))[f] is recommended and slightly more efficient
than as.numeric(as.character(f)).
(however, the first way did not work for me, maybe I made a mistake, but the second way with as.numeric(as.character()) works)

Related

NA in alphanumerical data

I have a data frame that has a variable Account_No. in which is in number format. I have account numbers that are numeric (2607242, 2607141) and alphanumeric (NWU14, NWU32). I see that all the alphanumeric data are NA. Please suggest how can I make those account number that are in alphanumeric format appear in my data set?
I tried:
as.numeric(x$Account_No."
What you described sounds like you started off with either a character or factor vector/column, then tried to coerce it to numeric, e.g.
x <- c("2607242", "2607141", "NWU14", "NWU32")
as.numeric(x)
[1] 2607242 2607141 NA NA
This also generates the warning message:
NAs introduced by coercion
If you intend to store values like NWU14, which contain characters other than numbers, then you should leave the type as character or factor.

Convert several columns of data frame to numeric

I am reading a txt file into R and have several columns that should be numeric, but everything is interpreted as character. Now I would like to convert only a few columns within that matrix (I converted it to a matrix in a first step) to numeric, but I only managed to extract columns, but that way I got rid of the type matrix...
data <- as.numeric(data[,1])
Now, I've found similar questions here but none of the answers worked in the way that it conserved the type matrix.
For example, I've tried to store the affected columns in a vector and then perform the action on that vector with lapply
cols<- c("a","b","d")
data<- as.matrix(lapply(cols, as.numeric))
But this gives me only empty fields, and of course it only shows the columns I selected and not the rest of the matrix. I also got the error message
NAs introduced by coercion
As a last step I tried the following, but I ended up having a list and not a matrix anymore
data[1:25] <- as.matrix(lapply(data[1:25], as.numeric))
What I would like to have, is a matrix where several columns (not just 1:25 as in my example above but rather, say, columns 1,3 and 6) are converted to numeric and the rest stays the same.
Does someone have an answer and maybe even an explanation for why the things I've tried didn't work?

Change data frame with factors to a big matrix R

I have a big data frame (22k rows, 400 columns) which is generated using read.csv from a csv file. It appears that every column is a factor and all the row values are the levels of this factor.
I now want to do some analysis (like PCA) but I can't work with it unless it is a matrix, but even when I try it like matrix, all I get is
> prcomp(as.matrix(my_data))
Error in colMeans(x, na.rm = TRUE) : 'x' must be numeric
Is there a way of transforming this data frame with factors to a simple big matrix?
I am new in R so forgive all the (maybe terrible) mistakes.
Thanks
You can do it that way:
df<-data.frame(a=as.factor(c(1,2,3)), b=as.factor(c(2,3,4)))
m<-apply(apply(df, 1, as.character), 1, as.numeric)
apply uses a method on the given data.frame. It is important not to leave out to transform it to character first, because otherwise it will be converted to the internal numeric representation of the factor.
To add column names, do this:
m<-m[-1,] # removes the first 'empty' row
colnames(m)<-c("a", "b") # replace the right hand side with your desired column names, e.g. the first row of your data.frame
One more tip. You probably read the data.frame from a file, when you set the parameter header=TRUE, the first row will not be the header but the column names of the data.frame will be correct.

Convert factor that includes "." to numeric

I'm using a dataset that has periods (.) in place of NAs. Right now, the column I'm looking at is a factor with levels 1, 2, and .. I'm trying to take a mean, and obviously, na.rm isn't working. I went back and cleaned the data by changing the periods to NAs (pe94[pe94 == "."] <- NA), and that appeared to work. However, mean can't take the mean of a factor, and when I convert the factor to a numeric, the NAs become 3s. How can I get rid of this problem?
I also had similar issues (and other issues) converting factors into numbers for mathematical analysis. However, I found a fairly simple solution that seems to work. Hope this helps ...
#Script to convert factor data to numeric data without loss or alterations of values
#Samlpe data frame with factor variables represented by numbers
factor.vector1<-factor(x=c(111,222,333,444,555))
thousands<-c("1,000","2,000","3,000","4,000","5,000")
factor.vector2<-factor(x=thousands)
df<-data.frame(factor.vector1, factor.vector2)
#Numbers as factors without comma place holders
#1st convert dataset to character data type
df[,1]<-as.character(df[,1])
#2nd convert dataset to numeric data type
df[,1]<-as.numeric(df[,1])
#Numbers as factors WITH comma place holders
#If data contains commas in the numbers (e.g. 2,000) use gsub to remove commas
#If commas are not removed before conversion, the value containing commas will become NA
df[,2]<-gsub(",", "", df[,2])
#1st convert dataset to character data type
df[,2]<-as.character(df[,2])
#2nd convert dataset to numeric data type
df[,2]<-as.numeric(df[,2])

How to convert dataframe of mostly factors into numeric matrix; unlist is not working

I am having trouble turning my data.frame into a matrix format. Because I wanted to change my data.frame with mostly factor variables into a numeric matrix, I used the following code
UN2010frame <- data.matrix(lapply(UN2010, as.numeric))
However when I checked the mode of the UN2010frame, it still showed up as a list. Because the code I want to run (Ordrating) does not accept data in a list format, I used UN2010matrix <- unlist(UN2010frame) to unlist my matrix. When I did this, my first row ( which was formerly a row with column names) turned into NAs. This was a problem for me because when I tried to run an ordinal IRT model using this data set, I got the following error message.
> Error in 1:nrow(Y) : argument of
> length 0
I think it is because all the values in my first row are now gone.
If you could help me on any front, It would be deeply appreciated.
Thank you very much!
Haillie
First, the correct use of data.matrix is :
data.matrix(UN2010)
as it converts automatically to numeric. The lapply in your code is the first source for the error you get. You put a list in the data.matrix function, not a dataframe. So it returns a list of matrices, and not a matrix.
Second, unlist returns a vector, not a matrix. So pretty sure you won't find a "first row with NA", as you have a vector. Which might explain part of your confusion.
You probably have a character column somewhere. Converting this to numeric gives NA. If you don't want this, then exclude them from the further analysis. One possibility is to use colwise() from the plyr package to convert only the factors:
colwise(as.numeric,is.factor)(UN2010)
Which returns a dataframe with only the factors. This can be easily converted by data.matrix() or as.matrix(). Alternatively you use the base solution :
id <- sapply(UN2010,is.character)
sapply(UN2010[!id],as.numeric)
which will return you a matrix with all non-character columns converted to numeric.If you really want to keep the dataframe with all original columns, you can do :
UN2010frame <- UN2010
UN2010frame[!id] <- lapply(UN2010[!id],as.numeric)
Toy example code :
UN2010 <- data.frame(
F1 = factor(rep(letters[1:3],10)),
F2 = factor(rep(letters[5:10],5)),
Char = rep(letters[11:16],each=5),
Num = 1:30,
stringsAsFactors=FALSE
)
Try as.data.frame instead of data.matrix.

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