R StepReg stepwise gives 'y' should be numeric or character vector

Question

I'm trying to do a stepwise regression on a data frame using StepReg, like this:

library(StepReg)

stepwise(BR_Click34_Crowd_pos[,c(10:45)], 
         y = BR_Click34_Crowd_pos[,c(10)], 
         exclude = BR_Click34_Crowd_pos[,c(15,17,23:25,31,32)], 
         selection = "bidirection", 
         select = 'adjRsq', 
         0.01, 
         0.05)

The data frame holds 45 columns of numeric data, with columns 10 - 45 passed in with column 10 as the output variable and columns 11 - 45 as the input variables, but with some columns excluded. The error message is " 'y' should be numeric or character vector " which refers to column 10 and using as.numeric on column 10 gives a different error ('list' object cannot be coerced to type 'double') and as.vector on column 10 gives the error ('y' should be numeric or character vector). Any thoughts, please?

we can't debug this without a reproducible example. At the very least, can you edit your question to include the results of str(BR_Click34_Crows_pos[10]) ? — Ben Bolker
Hi, welcome to stack overflow. Can you please include a reproducible example, which will make it easier for others to help you.Consider looking at this and this stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/…. Including your data, or a subset of it would be a great first step. — Mark Neal
Thank you @BenBolker, I'd misunderstood the data format required. — MzEdd
Thank you @MarkNeal, I'd misunderstood the data format required. — MzEdd

Chuck P Chuck P · Accepted Answer · 2020-08-02T21:23:44

This error is produced because the function is expecting the name of the y variable in quotes or as a numeric column number not as a pointer to a column in the dataframe BR_Click34_Crowd_pos[,c(10)]

See the documentation for examples...

stepwise(yx[,3:12], y = "Y1", exclude = "Y3", 
         selection = "bidirection", select='adjRsq', sle = 0.01, sls = 0.05)

R StepReg stepwise gives 'y' should be numeric or character vector

1 Answers