How to replace NA in a column with specific value

In this tutorial we will learn how to replace missing values/NA in a column with a specific value. We will replace NA in a column using two approaches. At first we will use dplyr function mutate and ifelse to identify the element(s) with NA and replace with a specific value. Next we will use base R approach to replace missing value(s) in a column.

To get started let us load the packages needed.

And also create a simple dataframe from scratch. Here create tibble, tidyverse variant of data frame using tribble() function.

The dataframe has three columns and the first column has one missing value, NA, in the last row.

Replace NA in column with a specific value using tidyverse

Let us say we want to replace the missing value with a specific value “Q4”, we can use mutate() function to update the column with a new one. We use ifelse() function identify missing value element and replace it with the value we want.

Replace NA in column with a specific value using base R

If were to use base R function to replace missing value in a column, we will first identify the index where there is NA in the column using is.na() function and assign the value of interest as shown below.