R: The Dummies Package

R-2.9.2 was released in August. While R can be considered stable and battle-ready, it is also far from stagnation. It is humbling to see such an intelligent and vibrant community helping CRAN grow faster than ever. Every day I see a new package or read a new comment on R-Help gives me pause to think.

As much as I like R, on occasion I will find myself lost in some dark corner. Sometimes, I find light. Sometimes I am gnashing teeth and wringing hands. Frustrated. In a recent foray, I found myself trying to do something that I thought exceedingly trivial: expanding character and factor vectors to dummy variables. There must be some function, but what? Trying ?dummy didn’t turn up anything. Surely some else must have encountered this and provided a package. I went to the Internet and sure enough the R-wiki was here to save me. And looking even harder, I found some who had treaded before me on the R-Help archives. It turns out, it’s simple. Expanding a variable as a dummy variable can be done like so:


x <- c(2, 2, 5, 3, 6, 5, NA)
xf <- factor(x, levels = 2:6)
model.matrix( ~ xf - 1)


Two problems. The first problem is that without an external source (Google), I would have never stumbled upon what I wanted. ( Thanks Google!) I understand it now, but for what I wanted to do, I would never have thought, “oh, model.matrix.”

The second problem is the arcane syntax, wtf <- ~ xf - 1. I get it now, but it took me some time to figure out what was going on. I get it, but why not just dummy(var)? This is what I want to do.

The solution on the wiki wasn’t quite what I was looking for. For instance, you can’t say:

model.matrix( ~ xf1 + xf2 + xf3- 1)

It turns out, you can only expand one variable at a time. Well, this is not good. I know that you could solve this with some sapply’s and some tests, but next time I might forgot about how to do it. So with a couple of spare hours, I decided that the next guy, wouldn’t have to think about it. He could just use my dummies package.

Like the R-wiki solution, the dummies package provides a nice interface for encoding a single variable. You can pass a variable -or- a variable name with a data frame. These are equivalent:


dummy( df$var )
dummy( "var", df )


Moreover, you can choose the style of the dummy names, whether to include unused factor level, to have verbose output, etc.

But more than the R-wiki solution, dummy.data.frame offers to something similar to data.frames. You can specify which columns to expand by name or class and whether to return non-expanded columns.

The package dummies-1.04 is available in CRAN. Comments and questions are always appreciated.