Advanced Machine Learning with R

Exploring categorical variables

When it comes to an understanding of your categorical variables, there're many different ways to go about it. We can easily use the base R table() function on a feature. If you just want to see how many distinct levels are in a feature, then dplyr works well. In this example, we examine type, which has three unique levels:

dplyr::count(gettysburg, dplyr::n_distinct(type))

The output of the preceding code is as follows:

# A tibble: 1 x 2     `dplyr::n_distinct(type)`        n                                            <int> <int>                                                     3    587

Let's now look at a way to explore all of the categorical features utilizing tidyverse principles. Doing it this way always allows you to save the tibble and examine the results in depth as needed. Here is a way of putting all ...