Hi,
I’ve got a naive question about categorical covariates when running association analysis. From the tutorial, it seems like categorical covariates have to be a boolean (isFemale true/false). Is there a way to run covariates with more than two levels, such as study site? Is there a way to get hail to see these as factors in R? Or would i have to decompose the covariates to multiple true/false columns (i.e. go from one column with site IDs to multiple columns as below)?
| sites | isSiteA | isSiteB | isSiteC |
|-------|---------|---------|---------|
| A | true | false | false |
| B | false | true | false |
| B | false | true | false |
| C | false | false | true |
| B | false | true | false |
| A | true | false | false |
Thanks,
-Jon