step_bin2factor: Create a factors from A dummy variable

In recipes: Preprocessing and Feature Engineering Steps for Modeling

Create a factors from A dummy variable

Description

step_bin2factor() creates a specification of a recipe step that will create a two-level factor from a single dummy variable.

Usage

step_bin2factor(
  recipe,
  ...,
  role = NA,
  trained = FALSE,
  levels = c("yes", "no"),
  ref_first = TRUE,
  columns = NULL,
  skip = FALSE,
  id = rand_id("bin2factor")
)

Arguments

recipe	A recipe object. The step will be added to the sequence of operations for this recipe.
...	One or more selector functions to choose variables for this step. See selections() for more details.
role	Not used by this step since no new variables are created.
trained	A logical to indicate if the quantities for preprocessing have been estimated.
levels	A length 2 character string that indicates the factor levels for the 1's (in the first position) and the zeros (second)
ref_first	Logical. Should the first level, which replaces 1's, be the factor reference level?
columns	A character string of the selected variable names. This field is a placeholder and will be populated once prep() is used.
skip	A logical. Should the step be skipped when the recipe is baked by bake()? While all operations are baked when prep() is run, some operations may not be able to be conducted on new data (e.g. processing the outcome variable(s)). Care should be taken when using skip = TRUE as it may affect the computations for subsequent operations.
id	A character string that is unique to this step to identify it.

Details

This operation may be useful for situations where a binary piece of information may need to be represented as categorical instead of numeric. For example, naive Bayes models would do better to have factor predictors so that the binomial distribution is modeled instead of a Gaussian probability density of numeric binary data. Note that the numeric data is only verified to be numeric (and does not count levels).

Value

An updated version of recipe with the new step added to the sequence of any existing operations.

Tidying

When you tidy() this step, a tibble is returned with columns terms and id:

terms

character, the selectors or variables selected

id

character, id of this step

Case weights

The underlying operation does not allow for case weights.

See Also

Other dummy variable and encoding steps: step_count(), step_date(), step_dummy(), step_dummy_extract(), step_dummy_multi_choice(), step_factor2string(), step_holiday(), step_indicate_na(), step_integer(), step_novel(), step_num2factor(), step_ordinalscore(), step_other(), step_regex(), step_relevel(), step_string2factor(), step_time(), step_unknown(), step_unorder()

Examples

data(covers, package = "modeldata")

rec <- recipe(~description, covers) %>%
  step_regex(description, pattern = "(rock|stony)", result = "rocks") %>%
  step_regex(description, pattern = "(rock|stony)", result = "more_rocks") %>%
  step_bin2factor(rocks)

tidy(rec, number = 3)

rec <- prep(rec, training = covers)
results <- bake(rec, new_data = covers)

table(results$rocks, results$more_rocks)

tidy(rec, number = 3)

recipes documentation built on April 13, 2025, 5:10 p.m.