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 in a non-alphabetical order.
Historically, factors were much easier to work with than characters. As a result, many of the functions in base R automatically convert characters to factors. This means that factors often crop up in places where they're not actually helpful. Fortunately, you don't need to worry about that in the tidyverse, and can focus on situations where factors are genuinely useful.
For more historical context on factors, I recommend [_stringsAsFactors: An unauthorized biography_](http://simplystatistics.org/2015/07/24/stringsasfactors-an-unauthorized-biography/) by Roger Peng, and [_stringsAsFactors = \<sigh\>_](http://notstatschat.tumblr.com/post/124987394001/stringsasfactors-sigh) by Thomas Lumley.
To work with factors, we'll use the __forcats__ package, which provides tools for dealing with **cat**egorical variables (and it's an anagram of factors!). It provides a wide range of helpers for working with factors. We'll also need dplyr for some data manipulation, and ggplot2 for visualisation.
Typically you'll convert a factor from a character vector, using `factor()`. Apart from the character input, the most important argument is the list of valid __levels__:
Sometimes you'd prefer that the order of the levels match the order of the first appearance in the data. You can do that when creating the factor by setting levels to `unique(x)`, or after the fact, with `fct_inorder()`:
For the rest of this chapter, we're going to focus on `forcats::gss_cat`. It's a sample of data from the [General Social Survey](http://gss.norc.org), which is a long-running US survey conducted by the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago. The survey has thousands of questions, so in `gss_cat` I've selected a handful that will illustrate some common challenges you'll encounter when working with factors.
These levels represent valid values that simply did not occur in this dataset. Unfortunately, dplyr doesn't yet have a `drop` option, but it will in the future.
When working with factors, the two most common operations are changing the order of the levels, and changing the values of the levels. Those operations are described in the sections below.
It's often useful to change the order of the factor levels in a visualisation. For example, imagine you want to explore the average number of hours spent watching TV per day across religions:
It is difficult to interpret this plot because there's no overall pattern. We can improve it by reordering the levels of `relig` using `fct_reorder()`. `fct_reorder()` takes three arguments:
Reordering religion makes it much easier to see that people in the "Don't know" category watch much more TV, and Hinduism & Other Eastern religions watch much less.
As you start making more complicated transformations, I'd recommend moving them out of `aes()` and into a separate `mutate()` step. For example, you could rewrite the plot above as:
Here, arbitrarily reordering the levels isn't a good idea! That's because `rincome` already has a principled order that we shouldn't mess with. Reserve `fct_reorder()` for factors whose levels are arbitrarily ordered.
However, it does make sense to pull "Not applicable" to the front with the other special levels. You can use `fct_relevel()`. It takes a factor, `f`, and then any number of levels that you want to move to the front of the line.
Another type of reordering is useful when you are colouring the lines on a plot. `fct_reorder2()` reorders the factor by the `y` values associated with the largest `x` values. This makes the plot easier to read because the line colours line up with the legend.
Finally, for bar plots, you can use `fct_infreq()` to order levels in increasing frequency: this is the simplest type of reordering because it doesn't need any extra variables. You may want to combine with `fct_rev()`.
More powerful than changing the orders of the levels is changing their values. This allows you to clarify labels for publication, and collapse levels for high-level displays. The most general and powerful tool is `fct_recode()`. It allows you to recode, or change, the value of each level. For example, take the `gss_cat$partyid`:
If you want to collapse a lot of levels, `fct_collapse()` is a useful variant of `fct_recode()`. For each new variable, you can provide a vector of old levels:
The default behaviour is to progressively lump together the smallest groups, ensuring that the aggregate is still the smallest group. In this case it's not very helpful: it is true that the majority of Americans in this survey are Protestant, but we've probably over collapsed.
