For the third year running, the Google Summer of Code program has sponsored a number of students working with R, and has again resulted in several new contributions expanding R in various fields. Dirk Eddelbuettel, who coordinated the R-related projects for GSoC in 2010, summarized the results, with details about the new packages now available for R thanks to the students and their mentors:
- Two packages for automated differentiation in R (calculating numeric derivatives of multivariate functions)
- Adding graphical capabilities (based on ggplot2) to the Deducer GUI for R
- An R wrapper for GEOS, adding 2-D and 3-D geometry features to R
- A new package for social relations analyses in R
For more information about these projects, and links to download the new packages, check Dirk's post linked below.
Thinking Inside the Box: R Project and Google Summer of Code: Wrapping up
Just FYI, Google Summer of Code has sponsored other R projects this year in other organizations, as well. For example, Conrad Stack made RBrownie, an R interface to the C++ program Brownie, which implements various biological analyses (Luke Harmon and I were mentors): it's now up on CRAN and an application note is in the works. [And Dirk and others involved in Rcpp were quite helpful during the development -- thanks!]
Posted by: Brian O'Meara | September 29, 2010 at 10:05
The gglot2 GUI in Deducer is a good first step. Of course, most of us like the fine control of scripting plots, but it is sometimes nice to point-and-click a few charts when poking around data, and I also like building a basic chart with Deducer then fine tuning with the generated code.
Maybe Revolution would consider creating a similar plotting interface when building the rumored RevR GUI tools? I think the "grammar of graphics" paradigm works extremely well with a charting GUI.
Posted by: Jason B | January 24, 2011 at 13:09