What are the different data types/objects in R?

Programming Language
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#1

This is another good opportunity to show that you know R, and you’re not winging it. Unlike other object-oriented languages such as C, R doesn’t ask users to declare a data type when assigning a variable. Instead, everything in R correlates to an R data object. When you assign a variable in R, you assign it a data object and that object’s data type determines the data type of the variable. The most commonly used data objects include:

  • Vectors
  • Matrices
  • Lists
  • Arrays
  • Factors
  • Data frames

R’s basic data types are character, numeric, integer, complex, and logical. R’s basic data structures include the vector, list, matrix, data frame, and factors.

  • Vectors are one of the basic R programming data objects. They are six types of atomic vectors- logical, integer, character, raw, double, and complex.
  • Lists are data objects of R that contain various types of elements including strings, numbers, vectors, and a nested list inside it. It can also consist of matrices or functions as elements. It can be created with the help of the list() function.
  • Matrices in R Programming are used to arrange elements in the two-dimensional layout. They contain elements of the same data type. They usually contain numeric values in order to perform mathematical operations.
  • An array is used to store data in more than just 2 dimensions. It is used to store multi-dimensional data in the required format. It can be created with the help of an array() function.
  • Factors are data objects that are used in order to categorize and store data as levels. They can be strings or integers. They are extremely useful in data analytics for statistical modeling. They can be created using factor() function.
  • Dataframe is a 2-dimensional data structure wherein each column consists of the value of one variable and each row consists of a value set from each column.