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Statistical Programming With R

Posted by timothy on from the no-r-in-statistics dept.

An anonymous reader writes "This series introduces you to R, a rich statistical environment, released as free software. It includes a programming language, an interactive shell, and extensive graphing capability. What's more, R comes with a spectacular collection of functions for mathematical and statistical manipulations -- with still more capabilities available in optional packages."

4 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. Good-oh... by BrokenHalo · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The *nix world could do with a statistics package as comprehensive and easy to use as SPSS or PASS, but that seems to be a holy grail of sorts.

    I've heard good things about R, but have never really got to grips with it (although I know it has been around for a while), so any kind of primer is more than welcome as far as I'm concerned.

  2. Graphing, hah! by Teancom · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We have a few people using R around here, mainly in the backend of cgis to produce graphs of various things. The main problem? If you want to output to a jpg or png (like, to display the result in a webpage), R has to create a window in X, draw onto the window, and then take a snapshot of the window. What this means on a headless sun machine? We get to run a virtual X server soley for our R cgis. Bloody hell, it's a stupid implementation of a crappy language.

    </cranky old man>

  3. What's a Robust Replacement for Excel??? . . . by Mr.+Pillows · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's time I wean myself off of excel particularly since the other day I couldn't even create a histogram since my dataset is more than ~64,000 data points, which is apparently excel's limit. Does anyone in the community know of a good replacement for excel that scales well to many data points but also has some sort of user-interface so that I can do some visual manipulations if I want to. I understand that most of these packages come with their own interactive shell and languages, but I would like to have both the command-line interface and a visual interface (like that of excel), while still being able to scale to many data points. Any suggestions?

  4. Comparison to octave? by j1m+5n0w · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does anyone have any insight on how this differs from octave?

    This is the first I've heard of R, but I've tried using octave a few times. It seems to be a sort of enhanced gnuplot. I was thinking about using it for a project I'm working on, though I may just stick with good 'ol C for performance.

    Do any of these projects work well with sparse matricies? I'm interested in using them to run a pagerank-like computation, but not if they use n^2 memory.

    -jim