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rmergeinteraction

How to compute a new variable that is defined by two variables using R?

I have a dataset with the variables sex and navigation. The sex variable has male and female as values. The "navigation" variable has menu and tags as values.

I want to create a new variable with the values male_menu, male_tags, female_menu & female_tags as those are the possible combination of the two existing variables.

How can I create such a new variable in R and include it in the original dataset?

Solution

  • I understood what you wanted somewhat differently than @zach. Here I use the interaction function to create a new factor with the four levels you specified. Here using some dummy data

    set.seed(42)

sex <- sample(c("Male","Female"), 20, replace = TRUE)
navigation <- sample(c("menu","tags"), 20, replace = TRUE)

interaction(sex, navigation)

    the last line gives

    > interaction(sex, navigation)
 [1] Female.tags Female.menu Male.tags   Female.tags Female.menu Female.tags
 [7] Female.menu Male.tags   Female.menu Female.tags Male.tags   Female.tags
[13] Female.menu Male.tags   Male.menu   Female.tags Female.menu Male.menu  
[19] Male.tags   Female.tags
Levels: Female.menu Male.menu Female.tags Male.tags

    Is that what you wanted?