dataframe - R: Imputing NAs with random choice of female or male

Question

I am working in R.

I have a data frame column with female or male and some NAs.

Now, I want to randomly assign female or male to the NA values in this column. I do not want to have all NAs be male or female but every NA randomly assigned either or.

How do I do that?

Best, corkinabottle

Answer 1

An option is to get an index of the NA elements in the column, then use sample with size specified as the number of NA elements to replace those NA with the male or female sampled

i1 <- is.na(df1$col1)
df1$col1[i1] <- sample(c('male', 'female'), size = sum(i1), replace = TRUE)

-output

df1
#    col1 col2
#1      a    1
#2 female    2
#3      b    3
#4   male    4
#5      a    5
#6      c    6
#7 female    7

data

df1 <- data.frame(col1 = c('a', NA, 'b', NA, 'a', 'c', NA), col2 = 1:7)