[R-sig-ME] Managing person identifier variable

[MACDOUGALL Margaret]

Hello



I would be most grateful for some advice in relation to the interpretation of a person identifier variable (persID, say),  in R. I would like to represent persons, as an independent variable, by a random effect. However, there are over 200 such persons. Each person is allocated a random numerical code as a unique identifier.  Currently, R is reading the identifier variable as a numeric variable. Is there a quick way of addressing this problem by recoding the variable?  (I do not wish to bin the values into category ranges; rather, I wish to avoid the numerical codes being interpreted literally.)



Many thanks



Margaret





-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
URL: <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-mixed-models/attachments/20161005/3aacfa32/attachment.pl>