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I am in the process of making a density map that will represent population density (more specifically, in Virginia) based on zip codes. I have followed the instructions that were given in the thread: Making a zip code choropleth in R using ggplot2 and ggmap (Essentially I copied the code)

However, whenever I tried feeding my own data, an error message occurs: Error in left_join_impl(x, y, by$x, by$y, suffix$x, suffix$y) : Can't join on 'region' x 'region' because of incompatible types (integer / character) In addition: Warning message: In min(xx[xx > upper]) : no non-missing arguments to min; returning Inf

The dataset that I want to use have the same format as "df_pop_zip". However, it just seems there is a problem with using my own data. To be more precise, "df_pop_zip" has two variables: "region"(zip code), and "value"(frequency of the zip code). I have created an excel sheet with two columns "region" and "value" with random zip codes and frequencies.

Can someone please provide any insight to this problem?

Thanks in advance, Martin

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Chaconne1004
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1 Answers1

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Sounds like you're trying to join by comparing a character to a numeric. Looks at the str() of the data you're reading in from excel to make sure you're joining like with like.

Adrian Martin
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  • Thanks for the reply, Adrian. – Chaconne1004 Apr 17 '17 at 19:11
  • However, I am not too sure on what you mean by comparing the two. The sample data that the author uses - 'df_pop_zip' looks like it has the same format as what my Excel data looks like, when I viewed both from Rstudio. – Chaconne1004 Apr 17 '17 at 19:19
  • Let's say you're running a join between data.frames a and b, matching by variable x. If you run class(a$x) and class(b$x), the result should be the same. Or, if you run str(a) and str(b), the results of those commands should show that the x variable is the same class in each dataframe. – Adrian Martin Apr 17 '17 at 19:30
  • Do you have any suggestions how I should proceed with this problem? I don't know how I should be looking into whether or not the Excel sheet is in a string mode or not. Any suggestion is welcome! – Chaconne1004 Apr 19 '17 at 20:05
  • Can you paste the results of str(x) and str(y)? – Adrian Martin Apr 20 '17 at 14:55
  • The data that ChoroplethrZIP package uses is - 'data.frame': 32989 obs. of 2 variables: $ region: chr "01001" "01002" "01003" "01005" ... $ value : num 17380 28718 11286 5120 14593 ... – Chaconne1004 Apr 20 '17 at 18:32
  • The data I am using is 'data.frame': 3 obs. of 2 variables: $ region: int 23223 24646 24649 $ value : int 10 15 400 – Chaconne1004 Apr 20 '17 at 18:32
  • [main] data.frame': 32989 obs. of 2 variables: $ region: chr "01001" "01002" "01003" "01005" ... $ value : num 17380 28718 11286 5120 14593 ... is the result of doing string for data that came with the package. – Chaconne1004 Apr 20 '17 at 18:39
  • Hey, sorry I didn't see this until now. So you're trying to join up an integer with a character. $ region: int 23223 etc etc is not going to join up correctly with $ region: chr 01001 etc etc. You need to either convert the integer column to a character column, or vice versa, before you can compare the two and find matches (which is what join needs to do). – Adrian Martin Apr 25 '17 at 01:31