Alternative for ifelse function in R to create a new numeric variable?

Question

A year ago, I created new variables (new1 & new2) with the ifelse statement in R:

data$new1<-ifelse(data$v1==1||data$v2==1||data$v3==1||data$v4==1,1,0)

data$new2<-ifelse(data$varx==307||data$varx==301||data$varx==309||data$varx==321,1,0)

Both statements turned out ok. To my surprise, neither of the two is working any longer since a few weeks... Do you have any idea what might have changed and even better - do you know an alternative function that performs the same calculation?

Thanks for any ideas !

Answer 1

Alternative apporach for the first ifelse would be to select the columns of interest, do a comparison ( == ) with 1, get the rowSums and check if it is greater than 0, then convert the logical vector to binary ( + )

+(rowSums(data[c('v1', 'v2', 'v3','v4')] == 1) > 0)

Or with Reduce , loop over the subset of column, convert to a list of logical vectors by looping over the list with lapply and doing the comparison, then Reduce to a single logical vector with |, and coerce to binary as before

+(Reduce(`|`, lapply(data[c('v1', 'v2', 'v3', 'v4')] `==`, 1)))

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For the second case, it would be comparing one column with a vector of values. So, use %in%

+(data$varx %in% c(307, 301, 309, 321))

Answer 2

You can do it like

setToOneCondition <- data$v1==1 | data$v2==1 | data$v3==1 |data$v4==1
data$new1 <- as.numeric(setToOneCondition)