R: Recipes for Analysis, Visualization and Machine Learning

Creating spatial data frames from regular data frames containing spatial and other data

When you have a regular data frame that has spatial attributes in addition to other attributes, processing them becomes easier if you convert them to full-fledged spatial objects. This recipe shows how to accomplish this.

Getting ready

Install the sp package. Download the nj-wages.csv file and ensure that it is in your R working directory.

How to do it...

To process a a regular data frame with spatial attributes, follow these steps:

1. Load the sp package:

   > library(sp)

2. Read the data:

   > nj <- read.csv("nj-wages.csv")
   > class(nj)
   [1] "data.frame"

3. Convert nj into a spatial object:

   > coordinates(nj) <- c("Long", "Lat") > class(nj) [1] "SpatialPointsDataFrame" attr(,"package") ...