Dear All, often I encounter variables, which have only few distinct values and an inherent metric. An example would be a risk score, which classifies patients in several groups like "low, intermediate, high, extreme" with corresponding risk estimates of "0, 1, 2, 5.5". In some cases, like tables and box-plots this score should be treated like a factor, in other cases like cox-regression it should be treated like a numeric variable.
Is there a convenient way to represent a variable like this? The crucial point is that the variable should retain its numerical values and its value labels. Without value labels it could be defined as factor and used or directly or by as.numeric(), because the levels still represent the numerical values, but as soon as labels are used, the original numerical values get lost. Thanks, Heinz Tüchler ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
