[R] Using caegorical variables in package randomForest.

[Liaw, Andy]

The way to represent categorical variables is with factors.  See ?factor.  randomForest() will handle factors appropriately, as most modeling functions in R.

Andy 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org 
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of abhishek
> Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 8:11 AM
> To: r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: [R] Using caegorical variables in package randomForest.
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am sorry if there are already post that answers to this 
> question but i
> tried to find them before making this post. I did not really 
> find relevant
> posts.
> 
> I am using randomForest package for building a two class 
> classifier. There
> are categorical variables and numerical variables in my data. 
> Different
> categorical variables have different number of categories 
> from 2 to 10. I am
> not sure about how to represent the categorical data.
> For example, I am using 0 and 1 for variables that have only 
> two categories.
> But, i doubt, the program is analysing the values as 
> numerical. Do you have
> any idea how can i use the c*ategorical variables for 
> building a two class
> classifier.* I am using a factor consisting of 0 and 1 for the
> classification target.
> 
> Thank you for your ideas.
> 
> -----
> abhishek
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