Factors

Introduction

In R, factors are used to work with categorical variables, variables that have a fixed and known set of possible values. They are also useful when you want to display character vectors in a non-alphabetical order.

Historically, factors were much easier to work with than characters. As a result, many of the functions in base R automatically convert characters to factors. This means that factors often crop up in places that are not helpful. Fortunately, you don't need to worry about that in the tidyverse, and can focus on situations where factors are genuinely useful.

Prerequisites

To work with factors, we'll use the forcats package, which is part of the core tidyverse. It provides tools for dealing with categorical variables (and it's an anagram of factors!) using a wide range of helpers for working with factors.

 library (tidyverse)

Source: H. Wickham and G. Grolemund, https://r4ds.had.co.nz/factors.html
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Creating factors

Imagine that you have a variable that records month:

x1 <- c("Dec", "Apr", "Jan", "Mar")

Using a string to record this variable has two problems:

1. There are only twelve possible months, and there's nothing saving you from typos:

   x2 <- c("Dec", "Apr", "Jam", "Mar")

2. It doesn't sort in a useful way:

   sort(x1)
   #> [1] "Apr" "Dec" "Jan" "Mar"

You can fix both of these problems with a factor. To create a factor you must start by creating a list of the valid levels:

month_levels <- c(
  "Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun", 
  "Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov", "Dec"
)

Now you can create a factor:

y1 <- factor(x1, levels = month_levels)
y1
#> [1] Dec Apr Jan Mar
#> Levels: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
sort(y1)
#> [1] Jan Mar Apr Dec
#> Levels: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

And any values not in the set will be silently converted to NA:

y2 <- factor(x2, levels = month_levels)
y2
#> [1] Dec  Apr  <NA> Mar 
#> Levels: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

If you want a warning, you can use readr::parse_factor():

y2 <- parse_factor(x2, levels = month_levels)
#> Warning: 1 parsing failure.
#> row col           expected actual
#>   3  -- value in level set    Jam

If you omit the levels, they'll be taken from the data in alphabetical order:

factor(x1)
#> [1] Dec Apr Jan Mar
#> Levels: Apr Dec Jan Mar

Sometimes you'd prefer that the order of the levels match the order of the first appearance in the data. You can do that when creating the factor by setting levels to unique(x), or after the fact, with fct_inorder():

f1 <- factor(x1, levels = unique(x1))
f1
#> [1] Dec Apr Jan Mar
#> Levels: Dec Apr Jan Mar

f2 <- x1 %>% factor() %>% fct_inorder()
f2
#> [1] Dec Apr Jan Mar
#> Levels: Dec Apr Jan Mar

If you ever need to access the set of valid levels directly, you can do so with levels():

levels(f2)
#> [1] "Dec" "Apr" "Jan" "Mar"

General Social Survey

For the rest of this chapter, we're going to focus on forcats::gss_cat. It's a sample of data from the General Social Survey, which is a long-running US survey conducted by the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago. The survey has thousands of questions, so in gss_cat I've selected a handful that will illustrate some common challenges you'll encounter when working with factors.

gss_cat
#> # A tibble: 21,483 x 9
#>    year marital      age race  rincome    partyid     relig     denom    tvhours
#>   <int> <fct>      <int> <fct> <fct>      <fct>       <fct>     <fct>      <int>
#> 1  2000 Never mar…    26 White $8000 to … Ind,near r… Protesta… Souther…      12
#> 2  2000 Divorced      48 White $8000 to … Not str re… Protesta… Baptist…      NA
#> 3  2000 Widowed       67 White Not appli… Independent Protesta… No deno…       2
#> 4  2000 Never mar…    39 White Not appli… Ind,near r… Orthodox… Not app…       4
#> 5  2000 Divorced      25 White Not appli… Not str de… None      Not app…       1
#> 6  2000 Married       25 White $20000 - … Strong dem… Protesta… Souther…      NA
#> # … with 21,477 more rows

(Remember, since this dataset is provided by a package, you can get more information about the variables with ?gss_cat.)

When factors are stored in a tibble, you can't see their levels so easily. One way to see them is with count():

gss_cat %>%
  count(race)
#> # A tibble: 3 x 2
#>   race      n
#>   <fct> <int>
#> 1 Other  1959
#> 2 Black  3129
#> 3 White 16395

Or with a bar chart:

ggplot(gss_cat, aes(race)) +
  geom_bar()

By default, ggplot2 will drop levels that don't have any values. You can force them to display with:

ggplot(gss_cat, aes(race)) +
  geom_bar() +
  scale_x_discrete(drop = FALSE)

These levels represent valid values that simply did not occur in this dataset. Unfortunately, dplyr doesn't yet have a drop option, but it will in the future.

When working with factors, the two most common operations are changing the order of the levels, and changing the values of the levels. Those operations are described in the sections below.

Exercise

1. Explore the distribution of rincome (reported income). What makes the default bar chart hard to understand? How could you improve the plot?

2. What is the most common relig in this survey? What's the most common partyid?

3. Which relig does denom (denomination) apply to? How can you find out with a table? How can you find out with a visualisation?

Modifying factor order

It's often useful to change the order of the factor levels in a visualisation. For example, imagine you want to explore the average number of hours spent watching TV per day across religions:

 relig_summary <- gss_cat %>%
  group_by(relig) %>%
  summarise(
    age = mean(age, na.rm = TRUE),
    tvhours = mean(tvhours, na.rm = TRUE),
    n = n()
  )
#> `summarise()` ungrouping output (override with `.groups` argument)

ggplot(relig_summary, aes(tvhours, relig)) + geom_point() 

It is difficult to interpret this plot because there's no overall pattern. We can improve it by reordering the levels of relig using fct_reorder(). fct_reorder() takes three arguments:

• f, the factor whose levels you want to modify.
• x, a numeric vector that you want to use to reorder the levels.
• Optionally, fun, a function that's used if there are multiple values of x for each value of f. The default value is median.

 ggplot(relig_summary, aes(tvhours, fct_reorder(relig, tvhours))) +
  geom_point() 

Reordering religion makes it much easier to see that people in the "Don't know" category watch much more TV, and Hinduism & Other Eastern religions watch much less.

As you start making more complicated transformations, I'd recommend moving them out of aes() and into a separate mutate() step. For example, you could rewrite the plot above as:

 relig_summary %>%
  mutate(relig = fct_reorder(relig, tvhours)) %>%
  ggplot(aes(tvhours, relig)) +
    geom_point() 

What if we create a similar plot looking at how average age varies across reported income level?

 rincome_summary <- gss_cat %>%
  group_by(rincome) %>%
  summarise(
    age = mean(age, na.rm = TRUE),
    tvhours = mean(tvhours, na.rm = TRUE),
    n = n()
  )
#> `summarise()` ungrouping output (override with `.groups` argument)

ggplot(rincome_summary, aes(age, fct_reorder(rincome, age))) + geom_point() 

Here, arbitrarily reordering the levels isn't a good idea! That's because rincome already has a principled order that we shouldn't mess with. Reserve fct_reorder() for factors whose levels are arbitrarily ordered.

However, it does make sense to pull "Not applicable" to the front with the other special levels. You can use fct_relevel(). It takes a factor, f, and then any number of levels that you want to move to the front of the line.

 ggplot(rincome_summary, aes(age, fct_relevel(rincome, "Not applicable"))) +
  geom_point() 

Why do you think the average age for "Not applicable" is so high?

Another type of reordering is useful when you are colouring the lines on a plot. fct_reorder2() reorders the factor by the y values associated with the largest x values. This makes the plot easier to read because the line colours line up with the legend.

 by_age <- gss_cat %>%
  filter(!is.na(age)) %>%
  count(age, marital) %>%
  group_by(age) %>%
  mutate(prop = n / sum(n))

ggplot(by_age, aes(age, prop, colour = marital)) +
  geom_line(na.rm = TRUE)

ggplot(by_age, aes(age, prop, colour = fct_reorder2(marital, age, prop))) +
  geom_line() +
  labs(colour = "marital")

Finally, for bar plots, you can use fct_infreq() to order levels in increasing frequency: this is the simplest type of reordering because it doesn't need any extra variables. You may want to combine with fct_rev().

 gss_cat %>%
  mutate(marital = marital %>% fct_infreq() %>% fct_rev()) %>%
  ggplot(aes(marital)) +
    geom_bar()

Modifying factor levels

More powerful than changing the orders of the levels is changing their values. This allows you to clarify labels for publication, and collapse levels for high-level displays. The most general and powerful tool is fct_recode(). It allows you to recode, or change, the value of each level. For example, take the gss_cat$partyid:

gss_cat %>% count(partyid)
#> # A tibble: 10 x 2
#>   partyid                n
#>   <fct>              <int>
#> 1 No answer            154
#> 2 Don't know             1
#> 3 Other party          393
#> 4 Strong republican   2314
#> 5 Not str republican  3032
#> 6 Ind,near rep        1791
#> # … with 4 more rows

The levels are terse and inconsistent. Let's tweak them to be longer and use a parallel construction.

gss_cat %>%
  mutate(partyid = fct_recode(partyid,
    "Republican, strong"    = "Strong republican",
    "Republican, weak"      = "Not str republican",
    "Independent, near rep" = "Ind,near rep",
    "Independent, near dem" = "Ind,near dem",
    "Democrat, weak"        = "Not str democrat",
    "Democrat, strong"      = "Strong democrat"
  )) %>%
  count(partyid)
#> # A tibble: 10 x 2
#>   partyid                   n
#>   <fct>                 <int>
#> 1 No answer               154
#> 2 Don't know                1
#> 3 Other party             393
#> 4 Republican, strong     2314
#> 5 Republican, weak       3032
#> 6 Independent, near rep  1791
#> # … with 4 more rows

fct_recode() will leave levels that aren't explicitly mentioned as is, and will warn you if you accidentally refer to a level that doesn't exist.

To combine groups, you can assign multiple old levels to the same new level:

gss_cat %>%
  mutate(partyid = fct_recode(partyid,
    "Republican, strong"    = "Strong republican",
    "Republican, weak"      = "Not str republican",
    "Independent, near rep" = "Ind,near rep",
    "Independent, near dem" = "Ind,near dem",
    "Democrat, weak"        = "Not str democrat",
    "Democrat, strong"      = "Strong democrat",
    "Other"                 = "No answer",
    "Other"                 = "Don't know",
    "Other"                 = "Other party"
  )) %>%
  count(partyid)
#> # A tibble: 8 x 2
#>   partyid                   n
#>   <fct>                 <int>
#> 1 Other                   548
#> 2 Republican, strong     2314
#> 3 Republican, weak       3032
#> 4 Independent, near rep  1791
#> 5 Independent            4119
#> 6 Independent, near dem  2499
#> # … with 2 more rows

You must use this technique with care: if you group together categories that are truly different you will end up with misleading results.

If you want to collapse a lot of levels, fct_collapse() is a useful variant of fct_recode(). For each new variable, you can provide a vector of old levels:

gss_cat %>%
  mutate(partyid = fct_collapse(partyid,
    other = c("No answer", "Don't know", "Other party"),
    rep = c("Strong republican", "Not str republican"),
    ind = c("Ind,near rep", "Independent", "Ind,near dem"),
    dem = c("Not str democrat", "Strong democrat")
  )) %>%
  count(partyid)
#> # A tibble: 4 x 2
#>   partyid     n
#>   <fct>   <int>
#> 1 other     548
#> 2 rep      5346
#> 3 ind      8409
#> 4 dem      7180

Sometimes you just want to lump together all the small groups to make a plot or table simpler. That's the job of fct_lump():

gss_cat %>%
  mutate(relig = fct_lump(relig)) %>%
  count(relig)
#> # A tibble: 2 x 2
#>   relig          n
#>   <fct>      <int>
#> 1 Protestant 10846
#> 2 Other      10637

The default behaviour is to progressively lump together the smallest groups, ensuring that the aggregate is still the smallest group. In this case it's not very helpful: it is true that the majority of Americans in this survey are Protestant, but we've probably over collapsed.

Instead, we can use the n parameter to specify how many groups (excluding other) we want to keep:

gss_cat %>%
  mutate(relig = fct_lump(relig, n = 10)) %>%
  count(relig, sort = TRUE) %>%
  print(n = Inf)
#> # A tibble: 10 x 2
#>    relig                       n
#>    <fct>                   <int>
#>  1 Protestant              10846
#>  2 Catholic                 5124
#>  3 None                     3523
#>  4 Christian                 689
#>  5 Other                     458
#>  6 Jewish                    388
#>  7 Buddhism                  147
#>  8 Inter-nondenominational   109
#>  9 Moslem/islam              104
#> 10 Orthodox-christian         95