[R] Dealing with factors ???

[Jeff Newmiller]

Your numeric data appears to have commas (thousands separators) in it. You don't say where you got the data, but Excel does this, and if this is the case then a straightforward way to fix it is to load it in Excel and set the formatting of all numeric columns to "general" before saving again.

You can also fix it in R using gsub to replace commas with empty strings and as.numeric to convert to numeric form.  There are examples of this in the mailing list archives.
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Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.

eric <ericstrom at aol.com> wrote:

>I have a data frame x that came from read.csv. It seemed to read in ok
>but
>then I tried doing some plotting of the values and ran into
>difficulties. 
>The plot command seems to be plotting factors instead of the values.
>How do
>I get rid of these factors ? The plot command I use is : plot (x$dat,
>x$TX,
>type='l'). I also tried  ...plot(x$dat, levels(x$TX), type='l) but got
>an
>error :
>
>What am I doing wrong here ?
>
>Error in plot.window(...) : need finite 'ylim' values
>In addition: Warning messages:
>1: In xy.coords(x, y, xlabel, ylabel, log) : NAs introduced by coercion
>2: In min(x) : no non-missing arguments to min; returning Inf
>3: In max(x) : no non-missing arguments to max; returning -Inf
>
> head(x,4)
>Period         PA           NJ                 MD            TX        
>          
>All        dat
>1 200812  903,231   1,985,460   905,422   3,312,088   7,106,201 
>2008-12-31
>2 200901  880,491   1,924,111   892,980   3,006,050   6,703,631 
>2009-01-31
>3 200902  883,994   1,926,169   890,021   3,247,530   6,947,714 
>2009-03-03
>4 200903  888,021   1,901,182   892,593   3,216,730   6,898,526 
>2009-03-31
>> str(x)
>'data.frame':	41 obs. of  7 variables:
> $ Period: int  200812 200901 200902 200903 200904 200905 200906 200907
>200908 200909 ...
>$ PA  : Factor w/ 41 levels " 818,037 "," 823,191 ",..: 26 22 23 25 19
>7 10
>2 1 12 ...
>$ NJ   : Factor w/ 41 levels " 1,599,113 ",..: 31 28 29 27 22 19 20 17
>14
>16 ...
>$ MD   : Factor w/ 41 levels " 800,827 "," 807,154 ",..: 27 25 23 24 15
>13
>11 6 5 3 ...
>$ TX   : Factor w/ 41 levels " 2,472,690 ",..: 41 23 40 39 35 34 32 21
>18
>27 ...
>$ All   : Factor w/ 41 levels " 6,111,993 ",..: 40 27 38 36 25 21 19 13
>11
>16 ...
> $ dat   :Class 'Date'  num [1:41] 14244 14275 14306 14334 14365 ...
>
>
>
>
>
>--
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>http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Dealing-with-factors-tp4649686.html
>Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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