R Error "Sum Not Meaningful for Factors"

R error sum not meaningful for factors

The error comes when you try to call sum(x) and x is a factor.

What that means is that one of your columns, though they look like numbers are actually factors (what you are seeing is the text representation)

simple fix, convert to numeric. However, it needs an intermeidate step of converting to character first. Use the following:

family[, 1] <- as.numeric(as.character( family[, 1] ))
family[, 3] <- as.numeric(as.character( family[, 3] ))

For a detailed explanation of why the intermediate as.character step is needed, take a look at this question: How to convert a factor to integer\numeric without loss of information?

Aggregate ‘sum’ not meaningful for factors in R

Using dplyr :

agg <- df %>% 
  group_by(col2, col3) %>% 
  summarise(col4 = sum(col4),
            col5 = sum(col5))

#   col2  col3   col4  col5
#   <fct> <fct> <dbl> <dbl>
# 1 mi    re        4     4
# 2 se    my        6     6
# 3 ty    my        5     5

Is that what you are looking for ?

In aggregate: sum not meaningful for factors

It is because of how you're creating your dataframe. For example, c1 is character because a vector can only have one class. When you put them into a dataframe, those character vectors are further coerced to factor. Thus you're trying to run sum on factors. You figured this out already, but then tried to convert factors to numeric, which is probably giving you nonsensical results.

The easy answer is to build your dataframe column-wise rather than row-wise, so you don't get into so many coercion problems.

Given the data you already have, this will solve your problem:

df[] <- lapply(df, function(x) type.convert(as.character(x)))
aggregate(. ~ V1, df, sum)

(Thanks to @AnandaMahto for the much cleaner way of doing that conversion than what I originally had.)

Result:

           V1 V2  V3   V4   V5  V6 V7
1 Afghanistan  2  54 34.5 10.4   2  0
2     Albania 12 160 72.5 70.5 664 12

Error in Summary.factor ‘min’ not meaningful for factors!! How can I eliminate this error?

You could use as.numeric in lapply like this:

test<-as.data.frame(lapply(test, function(x) {
     levels(x)[levels(x) %in% na_code] <- 0
  as.numeric(x) }))

Hope it helps!

Error in Summary.factor(1L, na.rm = FALSE) : sum not meaningful for factors for aggregate

You have to switch Name and value:

aggregate(value ~ Name, data = data, FUN = "sum")
  Name value
1    A    15
2    B    40

sum' not meaningful for factors while using diag(prop.table()) functionality

The reason is mentioned in the error, the variable is factor. It is not possible to apply prop.table directly on a factor class as it requires some computation.

prop.table(m1)

Error in Summary.factor(c(2L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 1L,
: ‘sum’ not meaningful for factors

Based on the values shown, it should be a logical vector, so convert it to logical and it should work

as.logical(m1)
prop.table(as.logical(m1))
#[1] 0.09090909 0.09090909 0.00000000 0.00000000 0.00000000 0.00000000 0.09090909 0.00000000 0.00000000 0.09090909 0.00000000 0.09090909 0.00000000 0.00000000
#[15] 0.09090909 0.00000000 0.09090909 0.09090909 0.00000000 0.09090909 0.09090909 0.00000000 0.00000000 0.09090909

data

set.seed(24)
m1 <- factor(sample(c(TRUE, FALSE), 24, replace=TRUE))
kdd_test_target  <- factor(sample(c(TRUE, FALSE), 24, replace=TRUE))

R: aggregating data frame sum not meaningful factors

Based on the str(nbaagg), nbaagg is a list of vectors and not a data.frame. It can be converted to data.frame with as.data.frame (here the list elements are of equal length

 nbaagg <- as.data.frame( nbaagg)

then, we can use

aggregate(.~ Team, nbaagg, FUN = sum, na.rm = TRUE, na.action = NULL)

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It was created as a list in this step

 nbaagg <- lapply(nbaagg, function(x) type.convert(as.numeric(x)))

The lapply output is always a list. If we want to have the same attributes as in the original dataset, use []

 nbaagg[] <- lapply(nbaagg, function(x) type.convert(as.numeric(x)))

---

Here, the type.convert can be directly used on the dataset assuming they are all character class instead of a loop with lapply

nbaagg <- type.convert(nbaagg, as.is = TRUE)

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