[R] Best practice: to factor or not to factor for float variables

[Sebastian Schubert]

Hi Hadley,

actually, I started with floating point numbers, ensured that the
respective numbers are equal in R but I still got strange behaviour with
dplyr's group_by:

https://github.com/hadley/dplyr/issues/482

If I had to guess, I would suppose the source of this error somewhere in
the C++ part of dplyr. This happened only on one machine I have
available. Whether this is a bug in dplyr, or in the older machine's
libraries, or not a bug at all, I cannot say. Nonetheless, this
confirmed my feelings about avoiding floating point numbers in this
context and lead me to ask for advice here...

Sebastian

Am 04.07.2014 17:33, schrieb Hadley Wickham:
> Why not just round the floating point numbers to ensure they're equal
> with zapsmall, round or signif?
> 
> Hadley
> 
> On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 4:04 AM, Sebastian Schubert
> <schubert.seb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I would like to ask for best practice advice on the design of data
>> structure and the connected analysis techniques.
>>
>> In my particular case, I have measurements of several variables at
>> several, sometimes equal, heights. Following the tidy data approach of
>> Hadley Wickham, I want to put all data in one data frame. In principle,
>> the height variable is something like a category. For example, I want to
>> average over time for every height. Using dplyr this works very well
>> when my height variable is a factor. However, if it is not a factor the
>> grouping sometimes will not work probably due to numerical issues:
>>
>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24555010/dplyr-and-group-by-factor-vs-no-factor
>> https://github.com/hadley/dplyr/issues/482
>>
>> Even if the behaviour described in the links above is a bug, on can
>> easily create other numerical issues in R:
>>> (0.1+0.2) == 0.3
>> [1] FALSE
>>
>> Thus, it seems one should avoid grouping by float values and, in my
>> case, use factors. However, from time to time, I need the numerical
>> character of the heights: compare heights, find the maximum height, etc.
>> Here, the ordered factor approach might help. However, I have to combine
>> (via rbind or merge) different data sets quite often so keeping the
>> order of the different ordered factor heights also seem to be difficult.
>>
>> Is there any general approach which reduces the work or do I have to
>> switch between approaches as needed?
>>
>> Thanks a lot for any input,
>> Sebastian
>>
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> 
> 
>