Conditional nested IF in R

Question

I have a column that contains some values as follows: 0 to 6 Each value refers to account type, whether revenue, expense etc

I am trying to use IF to look for the value and assign it its correct classification.

I have tried the following but it didn't work.

account_type <- if(df$class = 0) {
  account_type = 'Suspense'
} else if (df$class = 1) {
  account_type = 'Asset'
}

I do appreciate your help. I would also appreciate it if you combine an explanation.

Thanks,

Answer 1

I guess that more preferable, R-ish way to do what you are trying to do, is to use a lookup table.

First, I create a reproducible example:

set.seed(68826333)

(
    dat <- data.frame(
        account = sample(1:4, 10, TRUE),
        value   = rnorm(10)
    )
)

#   account       value
#1        2  1.17913936
#2        1 -1.40654534
#3        3 -2.46079924
#4        1 -0.20670095
#5        1 -1.29534910
#6        1  0.80030380
#7        4  0.37431903
#8        4 -0.07338782
#9        1 -0.50872642
#10       4 -0.15198686

Then I create a lookup table:

(
    lookup <- c('1' = 'Asset', '2' = 'Suspense', '3' = 'Revenue', '4' = 'Expense')
)

#         1          2          3          4 
#   "Asset" "Suspense"  "Revenue"  "Expense" 

In my lookup table names of the vector corresponds to values of the account variable from dat.

Now, whenever you want to map your numerical data from account variable into account types, you can do just simple subsetting and reassignment:

dat$account <- lookup[as.character(dat$account)]

#dat
#    account       value
#1  Suspense  1.17913936
#2     Asset -1.40654534
#3   Revenue -2.46079924
#4     Asset -0.20670095
#5     Asset -1.29534910
#6     Asset  0.80030380
#7   Expense  0.37431903
#8   Expense -0.07338782
#9     Asset -0.50872642
#10  Expense -0.15198686

Answer 2

I have used merge and it worked:

I created a new dataset and included the account types and called it class merged1 is the first dataset that includes the full account numbers

merged2 <- merge(merged1, class, by.x = "classification", by.y = "class")

I am still willing to see more answers if there is an easier way, I am new to R and programming languages.

Thanks,

Answer 3

If you already have a dataframe with class value and name then using merge is the easiest way.

Here is another way using recode where you can specify from and to values.

library(dplyr)

df <- df %>% mutate(account_type = recode(class, `1`='Suspense', `2` = 'Asset'))

df