How to Fix: Error in colMeans(x, na.rm = TRUE) : ‘x’ must be numeric

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One error message you may encounter when using R is:

Error in colMeans(x, na.rm = TRUE) : 'x' must be numeric

This error usually occurs when you attempt to use the prcomp() function to perform principal components analysis in R, yet one or more of the columns in the data frame you’re using is not numeric.

There are two ways to get around this error:

Method 1: Convert Non-Numeric Columns to Numeric

Method 2: Remove Non-Numeric Columns from Data Frame

The following examples show how to use each method in practice.

How to Reproduce the Error

Suppose we attempt to perform principal components analysis on the following data frame that contains a character column:

#create data frame
df frame(team=c('A', 'A', 'C', 'B', 'C', 'B', 'B', 'C', 'A'),
                 points=c(12, 8, 26, 25, 38, 30, 24, 24, 15),
                 rebounds=c(10, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 8, 18, 22))

#view data frame
df

  team points rebounds
1    A     12       10
2    A      8        4
3    C     26        5
4    B     25        5
5    C     38        4
6    B     30        3
7    B     24        8
8    C     24       18
9    A     15       22

#attempt to calculate principal components
prcomp(df)

Error in colMeans(x, na.rm = TRUE) : 'x' must be numeric

The team column is a character column, which causes an error when we attempt to use the prcomp() function.

Method 1: Convert Non-Numeric Columns to Numeric

One way to avoid the error is to convert the team column to a numeric column before using the prcomp() function:

#convert character column to numeric
df$team numeric(as.factor(df$team))

#view updated data frame
df

  team points rebounds
1    1     12       10
2    1      8        4
3    3     26        5
4    2     25        5
5    3     38        4
6    2     30        3
7    2     24        8
8    3     24       18
9    1     15       22

#calculate principal components
prcomp(df)

Standard deviations (1, .., p=3):
[1] 9.8252704 6.0990235 0.4880538

Rotation (n x k) = (3 x 3):
                 PC1        PC2         PC3
team     -0.06810285 0.04199272  0.99679417
points   -0.91850806 0.38741460 -0.07907512
rebounds  0.38949319 0.92094872 -0.01218661

This time we don’t receive any error because each column in the data frame is numeric.

Method 2: Remove Non-Numeric Columns from Data Frame

Another way to avoid the error is to simply remove any non-numeric columns from the data frame before using the prcomp() function:

#remove non-numeric columns from data frame
df_new numeric))]

#view new data frame
df_new

  points rebounds
1     12       10
2      8        4
3     26        5
4     25        5
5     38        4
6     30        3
7     24        8
8     24       18
9     15       22

#calculate principal components
prcomp(df_new)

Standard deviations (1, .., p=2):
[1] 9.802541 6.093638

Rotation (n x k) = (2 x 2):
                PC1       PC2
points    0.9199431 0.3920519
rebounds -0.3920519 0.9199431

Once again, we we don’t receive any error because each column in the data frame is numeric.

Note: In most cases, the first method is the preferred solution because it allows you to use all of the data rather than removing some of the columns.

Additional Resources

The following tutorials explain how to fix other common errors in R:

How to Fix in R: Arguments imply differing number of rows
How to Fix in R: error in select unused arguments
How to Fix in R: replacement has length zero