R Project for Statistical Computing

Web Page: http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=developers:projects:gsoc2010

Mailing List: https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

The R Foundation (as the legal entity behind the R Project) is a not-for-profit organization working in the public interest. It has been founded by the members of the R Development Core Team in order to

• Provide support for the R project and other innovations in statistical computing. We believe that R has become a mature and valuable tool and we would like to ensure its continued development and the development of future innovations in software for statistical and computational research.
• Provide a reference point for individuals, instititutions or commercial enterprises that want to support or interact with the R development community.
• Hold and administer the copyright of R software and documentation.

R is an official part of the Free Software Foundation's GNU project, and the R Foundation has similar goals to other open source software foundations like the Apache Foundation or the GNOME Foundation.

Among the goals of the R Foundation are the support of continued development of R, the exploration of new methodology, teaching and training of statistical computing and the organization of meetings and conferences with a statistical computing orientation.

Projects

• A GUI for Graphics Using ggplot2 and Deducer R puts the latest statistical techniques at one’s fingertips through thousands of add-on packages available on the CRAN download servers. The price for all of this power is complexity. Deducer is a cross-platform cross-console graphical user interface built on top of R designed to reduce this complexity. This project proposes to extend the scope of Deducer by creating an innovative yet intuitive system for generating statistical graphics based on the ggplot2 package.
• rdx - Automatic Differentiation in R rdx is a package to compute derivatives (of any order) of native R code for multivariate functions with vector outputs, f:R^m → R^n, through Automatic Differentiation (AD). Numerical evaluation of derivatives has widespread uses in many fields. rdx will implement two modes for the computation of derivatives, the Forward and Reverse modes of AD, combining which we can efficiently compute Jacobians and Hessians. Higher order derivatives will be evaluated through Univariate Taylor Propagation.
• rgeos - an R wrapper for GEOS At present there does not exist a robust geometry engine available to R, the tools that are available tend to be limited in scope and do not easily integrate with existing spatial analysis tools. GEOS [1] is a powerful open source geometry engine written in C++ that implements spatial functions and operators from the OpenGIS Simple Features for SQL [2] specification. rgeos will make these tools available within R and will integrate with existing spatial data tools through the sp package [3].
• Social Relations Analyses in R Social Relations Analyses (SRAs; Kenny, 1994) are a "hot topic" both in personality and in social psychology. While more and more research groups adopt the methodology, software solutions are lacking far behind - the main software for calculating SRAs are two DOS programs from 1995, which have a lot of restrictions. My GSOC project will extend the functionality of these existing programs and bring the power of SRAs into the R Environment for Statistical Computing as a state-of-the-art package.