Generate a dummy-variable

Question

I have trouble generating the following dummy-variables in R:

I\'m analyzing yearly time series data (time period 1948-2009). I have two questions:

1. <

Answer 1

For the usecase as presented in the question, you can also just multiply the logical condition with 1 (or maybe even better, with 1L):

# example data
df1 <- data.frame(yr = 1951:1960)

# create the dummies
df1$is.1957 <- 1L * (df1$yr == 1957)
df1$after.1957 <- 1L * (df1$yr >= 1957)

which gives:

> df1
     yr is.1957 after.1957
1  1951       0          0
2  1952       0          0
3  1953       0          0
4  1954       0          0
5  1955       0          0
6  1956       0          0
7  1957       1          1
8  1958       0          1
9  1959       0          1
10 1960       0          1

---

For the usecases as presented in for example the answers of @zx8754 and @Sotos, there are still some other options which haven't been covered yet imo.

1) Make your own make_dummies-function

# example data
df2 <- data.frame(id = 1:5, year = c(1991:1994,1992))

# create a function
make_dummies <- function(v, prefix = '') {
  s <- sort(unique(v))
  d <- outer(v, s, function(v, s) 1L * (v == s))
  colnames(d) <- paste0(prefix, s)
  d
}

# bind the dummies to the original dataframe
cbind(df2, make_dummies(df2$year, prefix = 'y'))

which gives:

  id year y1991 y1992 y1993 y1994
1  1 1991     1     0     0     0
2  2 1992     0     1     0     0
3  3 1993     0     0     1     0
4  4 1994     0     0     0     1
5  5 1992     0     1     0     0

2) use the dcast-function from either data.table or reshape2

 dcast(df2, id + year ~ year, fun.aggregate = length)

which gives:

  id year 1991 1992 1993 1994
1  1 1991    1    0    0    0
2  2 1992    0    1    0    0
3  3 1993    0    0    1    0
4  4 1994    0    0    0    1
5  5 1992    0    1    0    0

However, this will not work when there are duplicate values in the column for which the dummies have to be created. In the case a specific aggregation function is needed for dcast and the result of of dcast need to be merged back to the original:

# example data
df3 <- data.frame(var = c("B", "C", "A", "B", "C"))

# aggregation function to get dummy values
f <- function(x) as.integer(length(x) > 0)

# reshape to wide with the cumstom aggregation function and merge back to the original
merge(df3, dcast(df3, var ~ var, fun.aggregate = f), by = 'var', all.x = TRUE)

which gives (note that the result is ordered according to the by column):

  var A B C
1   A 1 0 0
2   B 0 1 0
3   B 0 1 0
4   C 0 0 1
5   C 0 0 1

3) use the spread-function from tidyr (with mutate from dplyr)

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)

df2 %>% 
  mutate(v = 1, yr = year) %>% 
  spread(yr, v, fill = 0)

which gives:

  id year 1991 1992 1993 1994
1  1 1991    1    0    0    0
2  2 1992    0    1    0    0
3  3 1993    0    0    1    0
4  4 1994    0    0    0    1
5  5 1992    0    1    0    0