Please read the posting guide. Your question is far from clear. First you're apparently unhappy because character vectors are being converted to factors. Then later you ask how to tell a function that some numeric datas should be considered factors. Which is it that you want? A simple short example would help.
> help.search('read.table.ffdf') No vignettes or demos or help files found with alias or concept or title matching 'read.table.ffdf' using regular expression matching. > help.search('biglm.big.matrix') No vignettes or demos or help files found with alias or concept or title matching 'biglm.big.matrix' using regular expression matching. You need to provide information about where these apparent functions come from. Regardless, if after using read.table.ffdf you have a data frame, you can convert any column, numeric or character, to a factor using the factor() function. You can also convert factors back to characters using, for example, format(). In other 'read' functions, such as read.table, when character data is converted to factors, the "labels" are not lost. Perhaps the documentation for read.table.ffdf describes how to prevent conversion to factor. -Don -- Don MacQueen Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 7000 East Ave., L-627 Livermore, CA 94550 925-423-1062 On 5/7/13 3:46 PM, "li li" <zgscg...@gmail.com> wrote: >I have a big data set that includes character variables of many different >values. I'm trying to use ff to read the data and then use >biglm.big.matrix >to build linear models. However, since big.matrix will convert all >character vectors to factors and the character labels will be lost. I >decided to create a lookup table outside of R for my character columns and >use numbers to represent different levels for R. However, I do not know >how >to tell read.table.ffdf these columns should be considered factors instead >of numerics. Please help. thanks. > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > >______________________________________________ >R-help@r-project.org mailing list >https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >PLEASE do read the posting guide >http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html >and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.