Predict weight and height of a person based on his nationality in R

Question

I know how to predict weight with given height from the observation but in this case there is a little modification. I need to predict the weight based on nationality. As far as I remember regression method is not applicable with categorical values in R.

How do i go about this?

Answer 1

One of the way by which you can achieve this is by representing categorical variables as binary vectors. Transform categorical variable to a format that works better with classification and regression algorithm. 

Something like this:

id	height	weight	nationality	nationality.us	nationality.uk	nationality.in	nationality.nz	nationality.aus
1	169	53	uk	0	1	0	0	0
2	145	67	us	1	0	0	0	0
3	125	45	in	0	0	1	0	0
4	156	76	aus	0	0	0	0

And then carry on with the usual method.