Working with neuralnet in R for the first time: get “requires numeric/complex matrix/vector arguments”

Question

I\'m in the process of attempting to learn to work with neural networks in R. As a learning problem, I\'ve been using the following problem over at Kaggle:

Don\'t wo

Answer 1

Error Message "requires numeric/complex matrix/vector arguments" occur when you have factor or character variables in your data.

There are three ways to solve this problem:

1. Delete the variable
2. If the variable is an ordered factor, use integer instead.
3. If the variable is character,transform it into factor and then into dummy variable.

You can use model.matrix() mentioned above or class.ind() function from nnet package to transfer factor into dummy variable.