forcats

Forcats is an R package that provides utilities specifically for working with factors, the categorical data type used in R. It is part of the tidyverse collection and is designed to make common factor-related tasks—such as reordering levels, recoding labels, and collapsing infrequent categories—more consistent and expressive than base R methods.

The package offers a range of functions for manipulating factor levels. Key capabilities include reordering levels (for example, fct_reorder, fct_reorder2, fct_relevel, fct_rev), recoding (fct_recode), lumping and collapsing levels (fct_lump, fct_lump_min, fct_lump_n, fct_collapse), and ordering by frequency or appearance (fct_infreq, fct_inorder). It also provides utilities to handle missing values explicitly (fct_explicit_na) and to drop unused levels (fct_drop). For summarizing or validating factor structure, functions like fct_count are commonly used.

Typical use cases involve preparing categorical data for visualization or modeling. For example, one might reorder a factor for a plot, lump rare categories into an “Other” group, or recode level labels for readability. Examples: data$size <- fct_relevel(data$size, "small", "medium", "large"); data$size <- fct_lump_min(data$size, 100) to group rare sizes; data$gender <- fct_recode(data$gender, Male="M", Female="F").

Availability and maintenance: forcats is an open-source package available on CRAN and GitHub as part of the tidyverse. It is maintained by the community and designed to integrate with other tidyverse tools, supporting a coherent workflow for handling categorical data in data frames and pipelines.