I noticed this interesting behavior and wasn't sure whether I was solving it in the right way, or whether it is indeed a feature:
When I modify the contrasts of a factor column in a tibble, the contrasts attribute seems to disappear (or otherwise be reset) if I nest and then unnest the data.
First, the contrasts behave normally without any nesting:
library(tidyverse)
library(magrittr) #for the double sided pipe
mydata <- crossing(group = 1:10, x = rep(c("a", "b"), 20)) %>%
mutate(y = if_else(x == "a", rnorm(n(), 1, 1), rnorm(n(), 0, 1)))
mydata %<>%
mutate(
x = factor(x),
x = structure(x, contrasts = c(0.5, -0.5))
)
contrasts(mydata$x)
[1] 0.5 -0.5
Then, if I nest the data, the contrasts are preserved in (at least the first) nested sub-dataframe.
# Initialize the data as in the first chunk
mydata %<>%
mutate(
x = factor(x),
x = structure(x, contrasts = c(0.5, -0.5))
) %>%
nest(data = -group)
contrasts(mydata$data[[1]]$x)
[1] 0.5 -0.5
But if I go on to then unnest the data, the contrasts appear to have returned to their default setting.
# Initialize the data as in the first chunk
mydata %<>%
mutate(
x = factor(x),
x = structure(x, contrasts = c(0.5, -0.5))
) %>%
nest(data = -group) %>%
unnest(data)
contrasts(mydata$x)
b
a 0
b 1
So it seems only to happen with unnesting, not with nesting.
I am bootstrap-resampling subgroups of data before modeling, so I need to nest and then unnest my data before fitting regressions with lm(). I've managed to get around the contrast dropping in my own work by just never setting the contrasts on any factor variables until after I call unnest(), but I don't know if that's the smoothest way to get around this.
- Is there a different way I can be setting column contrasts so that they will persist through unnesting?
- Is this intended or unintended behavior of
unnest()?
PS: I am not sure if using the recipes package to preprocess my predictor variables before running my regressions would solve this in a cleaner way. I would like to transition some of my code to use the tidymodels framework in the future, but I haven't gotten around to it yet 