Error code when trying to replace na with 0

Question

Within my data frame, there are quite many "na" values as some values (for experimental reasons) are not collected from all groups. When I try to replace this "na" values with 0, the following error code comes, although I did import the R code with the GNU R script provided by SoSci Survey.

My Code:
dataframeMA[is.na(dataframeMA)] <- 0

The Error:
Fehler in as.POSIXct.numeric(value) : 'origin' must be supplied

I can't find the reason for this code or how to resolve it.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Looks like dataframeMA is not a numeric variable, but your whole data.frame including a date (POSIXct) that cannot simply be set to 0.

I recommend being very careful with simply replacing NA by 0, and limit that to single variables:

dataframeMA$AB01[is.na(dataframeMA$AB01)] = 0

Of course you can use a loop to do that for several variables at once.

Actually, I recommend using tidyverse for such operations, for example replace_na().

Watch out: If you replace the wrong variables, you will screw up the whole dataset and all means and correlations.