r4ds/factors.Rmd

# 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 with non-alphabetical order.

Historically, factors were much easier to work with than characters so many functions in base R automatically convert characters to factors (controlled by the dread `stringsAsFactors` argument). To get more historical context, you might want to read [_stringsAsFactors: An unauthorized biography_](http://simplystatistics.org/2015/07/24/stringsasfactors-an-unauthorized-biography/) by Roger Peng or [_stringsAsFactors = \<sigh\>_](http://notstatschat.tumblr.com/post/124987394001/stringsasfactors-sigh) by Thomas Lumley.  

Factors aren't as common in the tidyverse, because no function will automatically turn a character vector into a factor. It is, however, a good idea to use factors when appropriate, and controlling their levels can be particularly useful for tailoring visualisations of categorical data.

### Prerequisites

To work with factors, we'll use the __forcats__ packages (tools for dealing **cat**egorical variables + anagram of factors). It provides a wide range of helpers for working with factors.  We'll also use ggplot2 because factors are particularly important for visualisation.

```{r setup, message = FALSE}
# devtools::install_github("hadley/forcats")
library(forcats)
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
```

## Creating factors

There are two ways to create a factor: during import with readr, using `col_factor()`, or after the fact, turning a string into a factor. Often you'll need to do a little experimetation, so I recommend starting with strings.

To turn a string into a factor, call `factor()`, supplying list of possible values:

```{r}

```

For the rest of this chapter, we're going to focus on `forcats::gss_cat`. It's a sample of variables from the [General Social Survey](https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/). The variables have been selected to illustrate a number of challenges with working with factors.

```{r}
gss_cat
````

You can see the levels of a factor with `levels()`:

```{r}
levels(gss_cat$race)
```

And this order is preserved in operations like `count()`:

```{r}
gss_cat %>% 
  count(race)
```

And in visualisations like `geom_bar()`:

```{r}
ggplot(gss_cat, aes(race)) + 
  geom_bar()
```

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

```{r}
ggplot(gss_cat, aes(race)) + 
  geom_bar() + 
  scale_x_discrete(drop = FALSE)
```

Currently dplyr doesn't have a `drop` option, but it will in the future.

## Modifying factor order

```{r}
relig <- gss_cat %>% 
  group_by(relig) %>% 
  summarise(
    age = mean(age, na.rm = TRUE),
    tvhours = mean(tvhours, na.rm = TRUE),
    n = n()
  )

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

If you just want to pull a couple of levels out to the front, you can use `fct_relevel()`.

```{r}
rincome <- gss_cat %>% 
  group_by(rincome) %>% 
  summarise(
    age = mean(age, na.rm = TRUE),
    tvhours = mean(tvhours, na.rm = TRUE),
    n = n()
  )

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

gss_cat %>% count(fct_rev(rincome))
```

`fct_rev(rincome)`
`fct_reorder(religion, rincome)`
`fct_reorder2(religion, year, rincome)`


```{r}
by_year <- gss_cat %>% 
  group_by(year, marital) %>% 
  count() %>% 
  mutate(prop = n / sum(n))

ggplot(by_year, aes(year, prop, colour = marital)) + 
  geom_line()

ggplot(by_year, aes(year, prop, colour = fct_reorder2(marital, year, prop))) + 
  geom_line()

```

## Modifying factor levels

`fct_recode()` is the most general. It allows you to transform levels.

### Manually grouping

```{r}
fct_count(fct_collapse(gss_cat$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")
))
```

### Lumping small groups together

```{r}
gss_cat %>% mutate(relig = fct_lump(relig)) %>% count(relig)
gss_cat %>% mutate(relig = fct_lump(relig, 5)) %>% count(relig, sort = TRUE)
```

```{r}
gss_cat$relig %>% fct_infreq() %>% fct_lump(5) %>% fct_count()
gss_cat$relig %>% fct_lump(5) %>% fct_infreq() %>% fct_count()
```

`fct_reorder()` is sometimes also useful. It...