How to add header to a dataset in R?

r dataset statistics
blueSurfer picture blueSurfer · Dec 24, 2012 · Viewed 130.3k times · Source

I need to read the ''wdbc.data' in the following data folder: http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/breast-cancer-wisconsin/

Doing this in R is easy using command read.csv but as the header is missing how can I add it? I have the information but don't know how to do this and I'd prefer do not edit the data file.

Answer

Jochem picture Jochem · Dec 24, 2012

You can do the following:

Load the data:

test <- read.csv(
          "http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/breast-cancer-wisconsin/breast-cancer-wisconsin.data",
          header=FALSE)

Note that the default value of the header argument for read.csv is TRUE so in order to get all lines you need to set it to FALSE.

Add names to the different columns in the data.frame

names(test) <- c("A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H","I","J","K")

or alternative and faster as I understand (not reloading the entire dataset):

colnames(test) <- c("A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H","I","J","K")

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