Chapter 6. Factors and Tables
Factors form the basis for many of R’s powerful operations, including many of those performed on tabular data. The motivation for factors comes from the notion of nominal, or categorical, variables in statistics. These values are nonnumerical in nature, corresponding to categories such as Democrat, Republican, and Unaffiliated, although they may be coded using numbers.
In this chapter, we’ll begin by looking at the extra information contained in factors and then focus on the functions used with factors. We’ll also explore tables and common table operations.
Factors and Levels
An R factor might be viewed simply as a vector ...
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