One hot encoding error “sort.list(y)…”

I'm trying to do one hot encoding on a data set containing 4 categorical features in R. Unique levels per feature: 400, 60, 6, 5, respectively. I get the following error during the first call to the ohe function (acm.disjonctif):

Error in sort.list(y) : 'x' must be atomic for 'sort.list' Have you called 'sort' on a list?

I can't do sorting on a per column basis because it will remove the data relationship between columns. What am I missing in understanding? I searched on the web but couldn't find anything helpful.

Here is the code I'm running in RStudio:

ohe_feats = c('RSN_CD', 'RSN_CAT', 'ELIG_SYS_CD', 'PROD_CD')
for (f in ohe_feats) {
df_all_dummy = acm.disjonctif(as.factor(nodups[f]))   # package = ade4
nodups[f] = NULL
nodups = cbind(nodups, df_all_dummy)
}

• What is nodups? And any particular reason you doing this in a loop and then cbinding the results together? – Peter Ellis Feb 1 '18 at 2:50

I may be missing the point, but you don't need to do this one variable at a time in a loop and then bind the columns together - that's not the R way. Here's an alternative:

# create some simulated data
n <- 10000
X <- data.frame(f_a_ = factor(sample(1:400, n, replace = TRUE)),
f_b_ = factor(sample(1:60, n, replace = TRUE)),
f_c_ = factor(sample(1:6, n, replace = TRUE)),
f_d_ = factor(sample(1:5, n, replace = TRUE)),
y = rep(1, n))

# use R's inbuilt understanding of formulas to do the "one hot encoding" for you
x_onehot <- model.matrix(y ~ ., data = X)