From pdalgd at gmail.com  Tue Feb 12 17:20:55 2013
From: pdalgd at gmail.com (peter dalgaard)
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:20:55 +0100
Subject: [Rd] Regression stars
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On Feb 12, 2013, at 17:05 , Brian Lee Yung Rowe wrote:

> 
> I thought that the default was the way it was for performance reasons. For large data.frames or repeated applications, using factors should be faster for non-trivial strings.

I think not. Historically, it's more like "In statistics we have two kinds of variables, numerical and categorical. OK, so we have the occasional truly character-type variables like name and address, let's handle those as a special case". 


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Peter Dalgaard, Professor
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
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[Rd] Regression stars
peter dalgaard