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r program changing yes/no variable to 1/0 - " variable 'medal' is not a factor"

I am new to R. I have a categorical variable that I like to make a linear model and do prediction with it but RStudio does not let me do so unless I change the type of the variable. How can I change the yes/no to 1/0? my error is " variable 'medal' is not a factor" I have tried :

> sport$medal <- factor(sport$medal)
> is.factor(sport$medal)
[1] FALSE
Solution

  • Apart from the obvious typo...

    How can I change the yes/no to 0/1?

    You need

    sport$medal <- factor(sport$medal, levels = c("yes", "no"))

    The default behaviour will give you 0 for "no" and 1 for "yes", as "n" comes ahead of "y" in alphabetical order.