How to preProcess features when some of them are factors?

Question

My question is related to this one regarding categorical data (factors in R terms) when using the Caret package. I understand from the linked post that if you use the \"fo

Answer 1

Here's a quick way to exclude factors or whatever you'd like from consideration:

set.seed(1)
N <- 20
dat <- data.frame( 
    x = factor(sample(LETTERS[1:5],N,replace=TRUE)),
    y = rnorm(N,5,12),
    z = rnorm(N,-5,17) + runif(N,2,12)
)

#' Function which wraps preProcess to exclude factors from the model.matrix
ppWrapper <- function( x, excludeClasses=c("factor"), ... ) {
    whichToExclude <- sapply( x, function(y) any(sapply(excludeClasses, function(excludeClass) is(y,excludeClass) )) )
    processedMat <- predict( preProcess( x[!whichToExclude], ...), newdata=x[!whichToExclude] )
    x[!whichToExclude] <- processedMat
    x
}

> ppWrapper(dat)
   x          y           z
1  C  1.6173595 -0.44054795
2  A -0.2933705 -1.98856921
3  C  1.2177384  0.65420288
4  D -0.8710374  0.62409408
5  D -0.4504202 -0.34048640
6  D -0.6943283  0.24236671
7  E  0.7778192  0.91606677
8  D  0.2184563 -0.44935163
9  C -0.3611408  0.26075970
10 B -0.7066441 -0.23046073
11 D -1.5154339 -0.75549761
12 D  0.4504825  0.38552988
13 B  1.5692675  0.04093040
14 C  0.4127541  0.13161807
15 D  0.5426321  1.09527418
16 B -2.1040322 -0.04544407
17 C  0.6928574  1.12090541
18 B  0.3580960  1.91446230
19 E  0.3619967 -0.89018040
20 A -1.2230522 -2.24567237

You can pass anything you want into ppWrapper and it will get passed along to preProcess.