How can I fix this invalid type error using lm()?

Question

Error in model.frame.default(formula = data$conservationstatus ~ data$latitude,  : 
  invalid type (NULL) for variable 'data$conservationstatus

I have a dataset (called data, after reading a CSV file), and it has the columns Conservation Status and Latitude. I'm trying to perform linear regression on these two using

lm(data$ConservationStatus ~ data$Latitude, data = data)

However, I keep getting the error above. It seems like it's because my column has two words in in it. I've tried data$Conservation Status, data$'Conservation Status', data$Conservation.Status, but nothing seems to work :(

Answer 1

We can specify the formula without data$. If the column name have spaces, use backquotes to wrap the column name

model <- lm(`Conservation Status` ~ Latitude, data = data)

It can be reproduced with a simple example

data(iris)
lm(iris$epal.Length ~ iris$Species, iris)

Error in model.frame.default(formula = iris$epal.Length ~ iris$Species, : invalid type (NULL) for variable 'iris$epal.Length'

and using the correct syntax

lm(Sepal.Length ~ Species, iris)

#Call:
#lm(formula = Sepal.Length ~ Species, data = iris)

#Coefficients:
#      (Intercept)  Speciesversicolor   Speciesvirginica  
#            5.006              0.930              1.582