cat2bin {fpc}

Recode nominal variables to binary variables

Description

Recodes a dataset with nominal variables so that the nominal variables are replaced by binary variables for the categories.

Usage

  cat2bin(x,categorical=NULL)

Arguments

x

data matrix or data frame. The data need to be organised case-wise, i.e., if there are categorical variables only, and 15 cases with values c(1,1,2) on the 3 variables, the data matrix needs 15 rows with values 1 1 2. (Categorical variables could take numbers or strings or anything that can be coerced to factor levels as values.)

categorical

vector of numbers of variables to be recoded.

Value

A list with components

data

data matrix with variables specified in categorical replaced by 0-1 variables, one for each category.

variableinfo

list of lists. One list for every variable in the original dataset, with four components each, namely type ("categorical" or "not recoded"), levels (levels of nominal recoded variables in order of binary variable in output dataset), ncat (number of categories for recoded variables), varnum (number of variables in output dataset belonging to this original variable).

Author(s)

Christian Hennig [e-mail] https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/christian.hennig/en

See Also

discrete.recode

Examples

  set.seed(776655)
  v1 <- rnorm(20)
  v2 <- rnorm(20)
  d1 <- sample(1:5,20,replace=TRUE)
  d2 <- sample(1:4,20,replace=TRUE)
  ldata <-cbind(v1,v2,d1,d2)
  lc <- cat2bin(ldata,categorical=3:4)