Merging two binary variables into one variable with four possible values

Question

I am still new to R, so this may be a stupid question, but:

I have two variables (gender [0,1] and vote [0,1).

I want to merge the two variables into one variable with four different values:

1) Gender=0, Vote=0

2) Gender=1, Vote=0

3) Gender=0, Vote=1

4) Gender=1, Vote=1

I guess I will need the if command, but it somehow won't work out for me.

Hope, anyone can help me :)

Perhaps you need expand.grid i.e. expand.grid(gender=0:1, vote=0:1) — akrun
– akrun, Commented May 5, 2016 at 12:48
But how do I use that to generate a new variable in my data frame with values (1,2,3,4) dependent on the values on gender and vote for each observation. Right now, it only prints a short table. — champlos
– champlos, Commented May 5, 2016 at 12:59
This is called the interaction of two factors. You need to convert your variables to factors and then call interaction(). — Ernest A
– Ernest A, Commented May 5, 2016 at 13:06

Romain · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-05 13:29:47Z

1

Here is one way to do it. akrun already post half of the solution in comment. There might be a better way though:

grid = expand.grid(gender=0:1, vote=0:1)
new_var = apply(grid,1,function(x) paste(x,collapse=""))
new_var = as.factor(new_var) # classic categorical format in R

answered May 5, 2016 at 13:29

Romain

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