gwern comments on 2012 Survey Results - Less Wrong

80 Post author: Yvain 07 December 2012 09:04PM

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Comment author: gwern 29 November 2012 07:37:32PM 1 point [-]

By the way, has anyone figured out how to load the CSV in R? read.table chokes with problems like "Error in read.table("for_public.csv", header = TRUE, quote = "", sep = ",") : more columns than column names"; dos2unix doesn't help, and loading it up in OpenOffice, it looks fine but re-exporting as CSV leads to the same darn errors. Mucking about, I can get it to load if I delete everything but the first entry and then the last 4 commas but this solution doesn't work for any additional entries!

Comment author: EvelynM 29 November 2012 07:43:20PM 5 points [-]

This worked "dat <- read.csv('http://raikoth.net/Stuff/LessWrong/for_public.csv')"

Comment author: gwern 29 November 2012 08:02:11PM 0 points [-]

That works, thanks.

Comment author: ChristianKl 29 November 2012 09:03:47PM 2 points [-]

Another R issue. How do I convert the scores from IQTest into real numbers? as.numeric seems to do strange things.

Comment author: Matt_Simpson 29 November 2012 09:43:21PM *  6 points [-]

use "as.numeric(as.character(dat$IQTest))"

The IQtest data is stored as factor. A factor variable has a set of levels, numbered 1,2,3,... that are the variable can possibly take on and labels for those factors. as.numeric(X) returns the level numbers of X. as.character returns the labels of X. In the case that the labels are actually numbers (usually integers that R is interpreting as character labels for some reason), as.numeric(as.character(X)) will return the numeric values that R is interpreting as labels.

EDIT:

In this case, when no value for IQtest was reported, it was stored as " " instead of "", which made R think the variable contained character data which R defaults to treating as factors. The " "'s should all be NA's once it's converted properly.

Comment author: EvelynM 29 November 2012 09:23:21PM 0 points [-]

"iqt <- as.numeric(dat$IQTest)" The already numeric IQ is in dat$IQ, iqt is only the suspect, online IQtest.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 02 December 2012 05:36:06AM 1 point [-]

A serious design flaw in S/R means that your code fails badly and silently. The man page suggests that you try as.numeric(factor(5:10)).

Matt Simpson's code is correct. The man page suggests slightly faster as.numeric(levels(dat$IQTest))[dat$IQTest]. That example also shows why they chose the the coercion that they did.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 29 November 2012 09:59:57PM *  1 point [-]

If you really did quote="", then you don't have any quote character and it won't work. But that's probably some kind of markdown error. The default in read.table is to allow both double and single quotes, while the default in read.csv is to only allow single quotes; I find that if I change your argument to quote="\"" to allow only double quotes, then it reads it with no errors. Another difference between read.table and read.csv is that read.table defaults to allowing # comments, which mangles one of the lines. This can be fixed with comment.char="", at which point read.csv and read.table produce the same result.