data.matrix {base}R Documentation

Convert a Data Frame to a Numeric Matrix

Description

Return the matrix obtained by converting all the variables in a data frame to numeric mode and then binding them together as the columns of a matrix. Factors and ordered factors are replaced by their internal codes.

Usage

data.matrix(frame, rownames.force = NA)

Arguments

frame a data frame whose components are logical vectors, factors or numeric vectors.
rownames.force logical indicating if the resulting matrix should have character (rather than NULL) rownames. The default, NA, uses NULL rownames if the data frame has ‘automatic’ row.names or for a zero-row data frame.

Details

Supplying a data frame with columns which are not numeric, factor or logical is an error. A warning is given if any non-factor column has a class, as then information can be lost.

Value

If frame inherits from class "data.frame", an integer or numeric matrix of the same dimensions as frame, with dimnames taken from the row.names (or NULL, depending on rownames.force) and names.
Otherwise, the result of as.matrix.

Note

The default behaviour for data frames differs from R < 2.5.0 which always gave the result character rownames.

References

Chambers, J. M. (1992) Data for models. Chapter 3 of Statistical Models in S eds J. M. Chambers and T. J. Hastie, Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.

See Also

as.matrix, data.frame, matrix.

Examples

DF <- data.frame(a=1:3, b=letters[10:12],
                 c=seq(as.Date("2004-01-01"), by = "week", len = 3),
                 stringsAsFactors = TRUE)
data.matrix(DF[1:2])
data.matrix(DF) # gives a warning and quotes dates as #days since 1970.

[Package base version 2.5.0 Index]