Ch. 4 | Exercise 3

Chapter 4 | Exercise 3

Create a factor subj1, a copy of the factor subj from the data set sent, and conflate the levels “Animal” and “Hum” into one category “Animate”. Next, reorder the three new levels as follows: “Animate”, “MatObj” and “Abstr”.

Key

First, load the package and the data, if you have not done so already:

> library(Rling)
> data(sent)

Create a copy of the factor:

> subj1 <- sent$subj

Next, add the new level “Animate”:

> subj1 <- factor(subj1, levels = c(levels(subj1), "Animate"))

Replace the values “Animal” and “Hum” with one value “Animate”:

> subj1[subj1=="Animal"|subj1=="Hum"] <- "Animate"

Get rid of the non-occurring levels:

> subj1 <- factor(subj1)
> levels(subj1)
[1] "Abstr"   "Animate" "MatObj"

Change the order of factor levels:

> subj1 <- factor(subj1, levels = c("Animate", "MatObj", "Abstr"))
> levels(subj1)
[1] "Animate" "MatObj"  "Abstr"