Fix the Error in colMeans(x, na.rm = TRUE) : ‘x’ must be numeric in R (2 Examples)

In this tutorial, I’ll demonstrate how to avoid the “Error in colMeans(x, na.rm = TRUE) : ‘x’ must be numeric” in R.

Creation of Example Data

data(iris)                            # Loading example data
head(iris)
#   Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
# 1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa
# 2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa
# 3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2  setosa
# 4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2  setosa
# 5          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2  setosa
# 6          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4  setosa

Example 1: Replicating the Error Message in colMeans(x, na.rm = TRUE) : ‘x’ must be numeric

prcomp(iris)                          # prcomp function cannot be applied to character column
# Error in colMeans(x, na.rm = TRUE) : 'x' must be numeric

Example 2: Debugging the Error Message in colMeans(x, na.rm = TRUE) : ‘x’ must be numeric

iris_numb <- iris                     # Transforming categories to numbers
iris_numb$Species <- as.numeric(as.factor(iris_numb$Species))
head(iris_numb)
#   Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
# 1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2       1
# 2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2       1
# 3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2       1
# 4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2       1
# 5          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2       1
# 6          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4       1
prcomp(iris_numb)                     # Applying prcomp function to new data frame
# Standard deviations (1, .., p=5):
# [1] 2.1996441 0.5023804 0.3094851 0.1914559 0.1443656
# 
# Rotation (n x k) = (5 x 5):
#                      PC1         PC2        PC3         PC4        PC5
# Sepal.Length  0.33402494 -0.68852577  0.4414776 -0.43312829  0.1784853
# Sepal.Width  -0.08034626 -0.68474905 -0.6114140  0.30348725 -0.2423462
# Petal.Length  0.80059273  0.09713877  0.1466787  0.49080356 -0.2953177
# Petal.Width   0.33657862  0.06894557 -0.4202025  0.06667133  0.8372253
# Species       0.35740442  0.20703034 -0.4828930 -0.68917499 -0.3482135

Related Tutorials & Further Resources

You may find some related R programming tutorials on topics such as coding errors and ggplot2 below.

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