Introducing forcats about moderndive_book HOT 2 CLOSED

That was an editorial decision on our part. On the one hand, we'd love to be able to include situations like this one, but on the other (as you suggest about the digression) once we try to start including everything, soon we'll end up with nothing. It's a tough balancing act. Also, in our opinions the reordering of factors is more of a topic for a straight data science course, and not so much a course on statistical inference that uses data science.

However, as you suggest, it might be worth at least point readers in the right direction, without entirely opening the can of worms that is categorical/factors.

from moderndive_book.

Hi @oscci, thanks for this suggestion. We just addressed it in d7dc2ab

Specifically in Section 6.2.2 Linear regression on linear regression with a categorical variable we amended the text to read:

You might be asking at this point why was Africa chosen as the "baseline for comparison" group. For no other reason than it comes first alphabetically of the five continents; by default R arranges factors/categorical variables in alphanumeric order. However you can change this baseline group to be another continent if you manipulate the variable continent's factor "levels" using the forcats package. See Chapter 15 of Garrett Grolemund and Hadley Wickham's book for examples.

from moderndive_book.