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

There is a function in caret's package that does what you require, dummyVars. Here is the example of it's usage taken from the authors documentation: http://topepo.github.io/caret/preprocess.html

library(earth)
data(etitanic)

dummies <- caret::dummyVars(survived ~ ., data = etitanic)
head(predict(dummies, newdata = etitanic))

  pclass.1st pclass.2nd pclass.3rd sex.female sex.male     age sibsp parch
1          1          0          0          1        0 29.0000     0     0
2          1          0          0          0        1  0.9167     1     2
3          1          0          0          1        0  2.0000     1     2
4          1          0          0          0        1 30.0000     1     2
5          1          0          0          1        0 25.0000     1     2
6          1          0          0          0        1 48.0000     0     0

The model.matrix options could be useful in case you had sparse data and wanted to use Matrix::sparse.model.matrix