What are Factors in R?

Factors are the data objects which are used to categorize the data and store it as levels. They are useful for storing categorical data. They can store both strings and integers. They are useful to categorize unique values in columns like “TRUE” or “FALSE”, or “MALE” or “FEMALE”, etc… They are useful in data analysis for statistical modeling.

To create a factor in R you need to use the function called factor(). The argument to this factor() is the vector.

Example:

# R program to illustrate factors
 
# Creating factor using factor()
fac = factor(c("Male", "Female", "Male",
               "Male", "Female", "Male", "Female"))
 
print(fac)

Output:

[1] Male   Female Male   Male   Female Male   Female
Levels: Female Male