This is not a big deal ... it is mainly a bug-busting maintenance release with a few new features (listed below). I mention it, however, to remind you that R exists.
R is in my view the most versatile and powerful statistical system available. Many people say it has a steep learning curve, but I think this is because it does not have a commonly used graphical user interface. In fact, if you are doing serious statistics, R is not harder to learn than any other professional system.
New Features in this release include:
- The "data.frame" and "factor" methods for [[ now support the 'exact' argument introduced in 2.6.0.
- plot.lm() gains a new argument 'cex.caption' to allow the size of the captions to be controlled.
- A series of changes make the CHARSXP cache introduced in 2.6.0 faster (and in some cases many times faster) in sessions with a large number (e.g. a million) of unique character strings, and also if there are many empty strings.
- embedFonts(), bitmap() and dev2bitmap() explicitly turn off auto-rotation in Ghostscript when generating PDF.
- The canonical architecture is no longer checked when loading packages using a non-empty sub-architecture, since it is possible to (e.g.) build packages for i386-pc-linux-gnu on both that architecture and on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.
- Deparsing will (if option warnIncomplete is set) warn on strings longer than the parser limit (8192 bytes).
- url() now uses the UserAgent header in http transactions in the same way as download.file() (making use of option "HTTPUserAgent").
All the details, including bug fixes are here.
And the The R Project for Statistical Computing site is here.
Technology
Comments
Yes, but don't get too excited.
One is called "S" and it is a commercial product that wouldn't suck if it didn't cost so much. But, S does everything R does. I've used it to good effect, but in the end I found it no easier than using straight R.
(The S people have a great data mining application and some other stuff that is good, but the S package is really just a way of getting people who need a GUI to give you lots of money).
There is a very small and unassuming GUI that lets you do simple stuff, and is basically a peer reviewed paper in computer science that happens to be a GUI for R. (Or at least that is how I interpret it) by John Fox, called R Commander. It works very nicely and lets you do a subset of R things. I don't use it, but I did test it out and it seems to work. You can get it here:
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/
there is an R interface for Gnumeric. Gnumeric is, of course, the world's coolest spreadheet. Makes Excel look like a kindergarten project. The last time I checked, this was not ready for prime time, but I think it may be working better these days . I'm just starting a new analysis so I may play with it, and if it is any good you can be sure I'll blog on it.
There are a number of other "R GUI" projects, but be warned: To R users, EMACS is a GUI. Uffda. Se the R-Cran site GUI page:
http://www.sciviews.org/_rgui/
Posted by: greg laden | February 24, 2008 10:25 PM