Dear List members, I have tried now for several times to find out about a side effect of treating invalid factor levels, but did not find an answer. Various answers on stackexchange etc. produce the stuff that irritates me without even mentioning it. So I am asking the list (apologies if this has been treated in the past).
If you add an invalid factor level to a column in a data frame, this has the side effect of turning a numerical column into a column with character strings. Here is a simple example: > df <- data.frame( P = factor(c("mittels", "mit", "mittels", "ueber", "mit", "mit")), ANSWER = factor(c(rep("PP>OBJ", 4), rep("OBJ>PP", 2))), RT = round(runif(6, 7000, 16000), 0)) > str(df) 'data.frame': 6 obs. of 3 variables: $ P : Factor w/ 3 levels "mit","mittels",..: 2 1 2 3 1 1 $ ANSWER: Factor w/ 2 levels "OBJ>PP","PP>OBJ": 2 2 2 2 1 1 $ RT : num 11157 13719 14388 14527 14686 .. > df <- rbind(df, c("in", "V>N", round(runif(1, 7000, 16000), 0))) > str(df) 'data.frame': 7 obs. of 3 variables: $ P : Factor w/ 3 levels "mit","mittels",..: 2 1 2 3 1 1 NA $ ANSWER: Factor w/ 2 levels "OBJ>PP","PP>OBJ": 2 2 2 2 1 1 NA $ RT : chr "11478" "15819" "8305" "8852" … You see that RT has changed from _num_ to _chr_ as a side effect of adding the invalid factor level as NA. I would appreciate understanding what the purpose of the type coercion is. Thanks in advance Tibor ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.