How to recode numerical variable into categorical?

1
votes

Hi I've been trying to recode numerical variables into categorical.

For example, using mtcars, I am trying to divide mpg into 2 category < 25 & =>25

These are the codes that I've tried, but getting error message.

data=mtcars
summary(mtcars$mpg)
Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
10.40   15.43   19.20   20.09   22.80   33.90 

mpgcat <- cut(mpg, breaks = (0,24.99,34), labels = c("0","1"))

Error: unexpected ',' in "mpgcat <- cut(mpg, breaks = (0,"

1
rrecode
Improved formatting and added relevant tag for R. So you'll get attention by other users here. - help-info.de
When you have breaks = (0, 24.99,34) you need breaks = c(0,24.99,34). Voting to closse as typo. - Gregor Thomas
Voting to close per Gregor's comment as well, however, posting the full, working line for clarity: cut(mtcars$mpg, breaks = c(0,24.99,34), labels = c("0","1")) - Mako212

1 Answers

2
votes

cut divides the range of x into intervals and codes the values in x according to which interval they fall. The leftmost interval corresponds to level one, the next leftmost to level two and so on.

breaks is either a numeric vector of two or more unique cut points or a single number (greater than or equal to 2) giving the number of intervals into which x is to be cut.

So you'll need some script code e.g.:

data=mtcars
summary(mtcars$mpg)
mpgcut <- cut(mtcars$mpg, breaks = c(0,24.99,34), labels = c("0","1"))
mpgcut

to get a result like this:

[1] 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0
Levels: 0 1