Table of Contents
The solution to this issue is to determine the data type of the variable ‘x’ and convert it to a numeric format, if it is not already numeric. To do this, you can use the as.numeric() function in R. This function will attempt to convert the value of ‘x’ to a numeric format, and if successful, the issue should be resolved.
One error you may encounter in R is:
Error in hist.default(data) : 'x' must be numeric
This error occurs when you attempt to create a histogram for a variable that is not numeric.
This tutorial shares exactly how to fix this error.
How to Reproduce the Error
Suppose we attempt to create a histogram for the following vector of data:
#define vector data <- c('1.2', '1.4', '1.7', '1.9', '2.2', '2.5', '3', '3.4', '3.7', '4.1') #attempt to create histogram to visualize distribution of values in vector hist(data) Error in hist.default(data) : 'x' must be numeric
We receive an error because data is currently not a numeric vector. We can confirm this by checking the class:
#check class
class(data)
[1] "character"
Currently data is a character vector.
How to Fix the Error
The easiest way to fix this error is to simply use as.numeric() to convert our vector to numeric:
#convert vector from character to numeric data_numeric <- as.numeric(data) #create histogram hist(data_numeric)
Notice that we don’t receive an error and we’re able to successfully create the histogram because our vector is now numeric.
We can verify this by checking the class:
#check class
class(data_numeric)
[1] "numeric"
The following tutorials explain how to fix other common errors in R: