Integer or Double vector? [duplicate]

Question

print(krit)
  names weight
1   may     36
2 mayer     49
3  mayo     35
4  mali     50
> mean(krit$weight)
[1] 42.5
> typeof(weight)
[1] "double"
> typeof(names)
[1] "character"

Why is the weight column a double vector and not integer vector? At what point do you specify a vector should be an integer or double? Does this pose any sign towards data analysis with R?

Welcome to StackOverflow! Please read How to Ask and edit your post to more clearly define exactly what your question is. At the moment it's not very clear what you're asking — Marsroverr
– Marsroverr, Commented Nov 18 at 15:42
Some more background here: r4ds.had.co.nz/vectors.html#numeric. R defaults to doubles. You can specify a single number as an integer by adding an L afterwards, and you can coerce a double vector to integer using as.integer(). — Jon Spring
– Jon Spring, Commented Nov 18 at 15:54
the differences between double/numeric/integer almost never matters, i cant think of a case off hand unless you did something like as.integer(1.5) where you should be rounding explicitly — rawr
– rawr, Commented Nov 18 at 16:05
Floating point numbers are great for most data analysis situations, and are used in almost every programming language. The main way people run into trouble is when testing for exact equality between finite decimals, as floating point numbers can't express every number exactly, even some simple ones like 0.1. So some care should be taken there. See stackoverflow.com/questions/9508518/… — Jon Spring
– Jon Spring, Commented Nov 18 at 20:23

user2554330 · Accepted Answer · 2025-11-18 16:06:37Z

In R, "double" or "integer" describes how the number is stored. The integer type can only store whole numbers, while the double type can store a large number of fractional values (but not all of them: only fractions where the denominator is a power of 2 within a specific range). The values that can be stored as an integer are strictly a subset of the values that can be stored as a double (since 2^0 = 1 can be the denominator of the fraction in the double).

Since most arithmetic in R needs fractional values, most numeric vectors use the double storage format.

For data analysis, this hardly ever matters. You can usually ignore the difference.

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