Quantum Forest

I was looking for a good free ‘point and click’ statistical software for some colleagues of mine. Although I did not find anything even close to what I was looking for — sort of R with menus — at least I found a nice R interface. JGR (pronounced like Jaguar) provides object browser, data and code editors (both with syntax highlighting), help browser and package manager.

I can see tools like the package manager evolving into tools for specific analyses like linear models, descriptive statistics, etc. I hope these guys can pull it off.

One of the reasons I have revisited R is that it provides access to a large range of cutting edge statistical procedures. This software project has a critical mass of users — actually, a great users’ community — that implies early adoption of statistical techniques.

I have struggled for a while with smoothing splines, and what better way of learning their use than playing with some data. Years ago I met Rod Ball in Forest Research (Rotorua, New Zealand), where he always made useful comments during my PhD presentations. The world is a small place, and now I am playing with Rod’s lmeSplines library, which allows fitting smoothing splines using lme. The library can be downloaded from CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network, see contributed packages under your operating system) and there is an introduction to its use in R news (PDF file 1.3MB).

P.S. 2004-11-18. I was contacted by a fellow ASReml user, worried because I was not using ASReml’s splines facilities. I want to make clear that there is no problem whatsoever with splines in ASReml. It is just that I am trying many alternative models (including non-linear ones), data manipulation and graphics with a dataset of squid behaviour, and doing everything inside one piece of software it is easier.