R Factors in Alteryx

[tcroberts]

Hi everyone,

Coming from an economics and data science background, I'm really enjoying using Alteryx and R together to make the most of my data. In Economics, Categorical data comes up quite a lot in analyses, and is handled in R quite easily using the "Factor" data type. I was wondering how Alteryx would handle this data type coming out of an R Tool, since in R, its treated somewhere between a string and an integer.

Cheers,

[asilva · Accepted solution]

Hi,

It will actually code the output as a V_WString. I attached a simple workflow.

It passed a text input into the R tool as a data frame, then it codes the column as a factor. I then output the data frame to Alteryx and use a Select tool to determine the variable type.

Thanks,

Tony

[JohnJPS]

Hi @tcroberts

Interesting question: it looks like they are treated as strings... although you can control what you want easily enough:

df1 <- read.Alteryx("#1", mode="data.frame")
df2 <- as.data.frame(unclass(df1))
df3 <- as.data.frame(data.matrix(df2))
write.Alteryx(df1,1)
write.Alteryx(df2,2)
write.Alteryx(df3,3)

DF2 should give you a factorized version of DF1, which is sent to output 2... DF3 gives you the numeric values of DF2, sent to output 3.  You can see that output 2 has the string values for the factors; output three will have the numeric values.

Hope that helps!

John

[tcroberts]

Hmm, thats interesting. Thanks for testing this out! Its good to know that its fairly easy to get the different attributes from a factor.

I wonder if there's been any discussion about creating ordinal or categorical variable types within Alteryx. In a recent workflow, I needed to create numeric proxies for a string variable in order to sort and perform some other operations. My job would've been made much easier by a tool that creates an ordinal field, and my mind immediately went to factors in R.

Cheers,