Home/ Questions/Q 4024626
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-20T10:44:40+00:00

I am trying to use the leaps package. This data frame df has 9

  • 0

I am trying to use the leaps package. This data frame df has 9 columns. Columns 2 through 8 are the explanatory variables and column 9 is the reponse variable. df also has (column) names.

When I try to use the leaps package, I get a cryptic error.

x <- df[,2:8]
y <- df[,9]
leaps <- regsubsets(x, y)
Error in leaps.setup(x, y, wt = weights, nbest = nbest, nvmax = nvmax,  : 
  character variables must be duplicated in .C/.Fortran

What does this error mean, and how can I prevent this?

Here is a snippet of the data.frame:

> dput(df[1:2,])
structure(list(Var1 = c(2396, 2396), Var2 = c(NA_character_, 
NA_character_), Var3 = c(NA_character_, NA_character_), Var4 = c(501, 
511), Var5 = c(5, 5), Var6 = c(13, 8), Var7 = c(NA_real_, NA_real_
), Var8 = c(NA_real_, NA_real_), Var9 = c(0.0047, 0.0371)), .Names = c("Var1", 
"Var2", "Var3", "Var4", "Var5", "Var6", "Var7", "Var8", "Var9"
), row.names = 1:2, class = "data.frame")

> str(df)
'data.frame':   10000 obs. of  9 variables:
 $ Var1: num  2396 2396 2396 2396 2396 ...
 $ Var2: chr  NA NA NA NA ...
 $ Var3: chr  NA NA NA NA ...
 $ Var4: num  501 511 523 757 770 803 803 803 807 506 ...
 $ Var5: num  5 5 3 5 1 1 5 5 5 5 ...
 $ Var6: num  13 8 13 11 13 8 13 8 11 11 ...
 $ Var7: num  NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA ...
 $ Var8: num  NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA ...
 $ Var9: num  0.0047 0.0371 0.042 0.0488 0.0048 ...

I tried replacing the missing values with 0 just to see if it would work, and that didn’t help.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I am not familiar with leaps at all but I could replicate your problem. I think the problem is that one of the variables is either a character or a factor:

    library("leaps")
df <- data.frame( foo = 1:10, bar = as.factor(1:10), resp = 1:10)
regsubsets(df[,-3],df[,3])

    Gives the error. Note that bar here is a factor:

    sapply(df,is.factor)
  foo   bar  resp 
FALSE  TRUE FALSE

    Coercing to numeric the error is gone:

    df$bar <- as.numeric(as.character(df$bar))
regsubsets(df[,-3],df[,3])

    This gives other warnings but that is probably due to the silly dataset

    • 0