How can I change a dataframe of factors so that the dataframe can be boxplotted?

Question

I have a dataframe of which the columns contain a variable amount of numbers and a variable amount of NA's. The dataframe looks like this:

    V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6
1    0 11  4  0  0 10
2    0 17  3  0  2  2
3   NA  0  4  0  1  9
4   NA 12 NA  1  1  0
<snip>
743 NA NA NA NA  8 NA
744 NA NA NA NA  0 NA

I want to make a boxplot out of this, but when I do

boxplot(dataframe)

I get the error

adding class "factor" to an invalid object

When I do

lapply(dataframe,class)

I get the folowing output:

$V1
[1] "factor"
$V2
[1] "factor"
<snip>
$V6
[1] "factor"

So how can I change my dataframe so that the columns are seen as numeric?

Answer 1

You want to apply as.numeric(as.character(...)) to each factor column. The code below shows how this can be done affecting only the factor variables leaving the numeric types alone.

## dummy data
df <- data.frame(V1 = factor(sample(1:5, 10, rep = TRUE)),
                 V2 = factor(sample(99:101, 10, rep = TRUE)),
                 V3 = factor(sample(1:2, 10, rep = TRUE)),
                 V4 = 1:10)

df2 <- data.frame(sapply(df, function(x) { if(is.factor(x)) {
                                              as.numeric(as.character(x))
                                           } else {
                                              x
                                           }
                                         }))

This gives:

> df2
   V1  V2 V3 V4
1   4 101  2  1
2   1 100  1  2
3   5  99  2  3
4   4  99  2  4
5   2 100  1  5
6   2 100  2  6
7   2 101  2  7
8   4 100  1  8
9   2 101  2  9
10  4 101  1 10
> str(df2)
'data.frame':   10 obs. of  4 variables:
 $ V1: num  4 1 5 4 2 2 2 4 2 4
 $ V2: num  101 100 99 99 100 100 101 100 101 101
 $ V3: num  2 1 2 2 1 2 2 1 2 1
 $ V4: num  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10