R: Recipes for Analysis, Visualization and Machine Learning

Converting types on character variables

In R, since nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio variable are treated differently in statistical modeling, we have to convert a nominal variable from a character into a factor.

Getting ready

You need to have the previous recipe completed by loading the Titanic training data into the R session, with the read.csv function and assigning an argument of na.strings equal to NA and the blank string (""). Then, assign the loaded data from train.csv into the train.data variables.

How to do it...

Perform the following steps to convert the types on character variables:

1. Use the str function to print the overview of the Titanic data:

   > str(train.data)
   'data.frame':  891 obs. of  12 variables:
    $ PassengerId: int 1 2 3 4 5 ...