Recode categorical factor with N categories into N binary columns

Question

Original data frame:

v1 = sample(letters[1:3], 10, replace=TRUE)
v2 = sample(letters[1:3], 10, replace=TRUE)
df = data.frame(v1,v2)
df
         


        

Answer 1

I recently came across another way. I noticed that when you run any of the contrasts functions with contrasts set to FALSE, it gives you one hot encoding. For example, contr.sum(5, contrasts = FALSE) gives

  1 2 3 4 5
1 1 0 0 0 0
2 0 1 0 0 0
3 0 0 1 0 0
4 0 0 0 1 0
5 0 0 0 0 1

To get this behavior for all of your factors, you can create a new contrast function and set it as the default. For example,

contr.onehot = function (n, contrasts, sparse = FALSE) {
  contr.sum(n = n, contrasts = FALSE, sparse = sparse)
}

options(contrasts = c("contr.onehot", "contr.onehot"))
model.matrix(~ . - 1, data = df)

This results in

   v1a v1b v1c v2a v2b v2c
1    0   0   1   0   0   1
2    0   1   0   1   0   0
3    0   0   1   0   1   0
4    1   0   0   0   1   0
5    0   1   0   0   1   0
6    0   1   0   0   0   1
7    1   0   0   0   1   0
8    0   1   0   0   1   0
9    0   1   0   1   0   0
10   0   0   1   0   0   1