Convert Factor to Numeric in R (Example)
This tutorial explains how to convert a factor vector to numeric in the R programming language.
Example Vector
vec <- as.factor(c("5", "2", "2", "7", "5")) # Create factor vector vec # Print example vector # [1] 5 2 2 7 5 # Levels: 2 5 7 |
Conversion of Factor to Numeric
The following R code converts our example vector from factor to numeric in R. Note that we need to convert the factor to character with the as.character() function first, before we can convert the character to numeric. If we don’t perform this step in between, we would lose the factor levels.
vec_num <- as.numeric(as.character(vec)) # Convert factor to numeric vec_num # Print updated vector # 5 2 2 7 5 |
Video Examples
The following video of the Statistics Globe YouTube channel explains how to change characters and factors to numeric:
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