I have a big data set that includes character variables of many different values. I'm trying to read the data as big.matrix and then use biglm.big.matrix to build linear models. However, since big.matrix will convert all character vectors to factors and the character labels will be lost, I decided to create a lookup table outside of R for my character columns and use numbers to represent different levels for R. However, I do not know how to tell big.matrix these columns should be considered factors instead of numerics. Please help. thanks. [[alternative HTML version deleted]]