The R package memisc, which is available at CRAN, provides tools for the management of survey data, graphics, statistics and simulation. The version published on CRAN is available here. A local copy of the source of the newest patchlevel (0.95-31) is available as memisc_0.95-31.tar.gz. A windows zip-file can be found as memisc_0.95-31.zip.
Although it is handy to have a lot of functionality collected into one package, such a package also creates its own challenges for maintenance. For this reasons I have split up the package in several smaller ones that will soon appear on this website as well as (hopefully) on CRAN. This webpage will contain news related to memisc and the packages to supersede it.
One of the facilities that the package provides is the for the creation of (nearly) publication-ready tables of estimates. In conjunction with LaTeX, the output of the mtable function of the package can produce output as can be seen in the following screenshot:
mtable can also be used to generate tab-delimited tables of estimates that can be included into word-processor software such as OpenOffice.
In adition to formatted output of estimates memisc also assist in conducting simulation experiments. For example, simulation results can be collected using the function Simulate and conveniently further processed to produce graphics such as in the following screenshot:
This shows how the law of large numbers can 'fail': Student's t-distribution with one degree of freedom (a Cauchy distribution) does not have a finite mean. Consequently averages of iid-random numbers with this distribution do not approach a finite value even if the sample size increases ad infinitum. (Actually, this example shows the relevance of the assumptions of finite variance and finite mean as premises of the law of large numbers.)
Another utility function contained in the memisc package is Termplot which is an enhanced version of the standard R function termplot. Termplot allows to 'compare' the fit of different models. The following screenshot demonstrates this with the example of different non-linear specifications of the effect of a predictor variable x on a response variable y. The data for this screenshot are generated thus that the 'true' effect of x on y is
.
More examples for the use of the package are given in the package vignette.
memisc 0.95-31
Posted on Fri, 16 Jul 2010 18:55:05 +0100
A new patchlevel of my memisc package is available on this website.
The following changes were made since the last patchlevel:
2010-07-16:
- fixed a bug in 'Simulate' that caused it to fail in certain situations in R version >= 2.11.
memisc 0.95-30
Posted on Mon, 12 Apr 2010 21:42:18 +0100
A new patchlevel (0.95-30) of my memisc package is on CRAN now..
The following changes were made since the last patchlevel:
2010-04-12:
- 'toLatex(mtable(
),useDcolumn=FALSE)' should now produce useable LaTeX output (dollars are added to the table entries).
2010-04-09:
- 'By' works now with 'genTable' and 'aggregate.formula'. It gains a 'data.frame' method, which better cooperates with calls to 'lm'-like functions. Their results get a 'data' component containing the subset of the data frame that was given as 'data' argument to the call of 'By'.
memisc 0.95-29
Posted on Thu, 8 Apr 2010 11:40:13 +0100
A new patchlevel (0.95-29) of my memisc package is on CRAN now..
The following changes were made since the last patchlevel:
2010-04-08:
- fixed bug in 'cases'. It works now with target expressions even with 'within'.
- 'write.mtable' now handles a 'forLaTeX=TRUE' option in a more convenient way.
- 'mtable' now handles objects of classes "polr" and "simex", thanks to a contribution from Christopher N. Lawrence (Texas A&M International University)
- support for 'mtable' output for "glm" objects with exponentiated coefficients and prelininary support for "lmer" object added, thanks to a contribution from Dave Atkins (Unversity of Washington). Also the coef.styles are changed to be more convenient.
2010-04-07:
- fixed bug in C-level function 'read_sysfile_subset' that caused spurious errors
while importing SPSS 'system' files with long strings.
This patchlevel fixes the following spurious errors:
str_count out of bounds, 8*str_count = 248, STRMAX = 256
memisc 0.95-27
Posted on Sat, 20 Mar 2010 19:14:33 +0000
A new patchlevel (0.95-27) of my memisc package is on CRAN now.
The following changes were made since the last patchlevel:
2010-03-18:
- patch to trimws to make it locale-neutral
memisc update
Posted on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:28:59 +0000
A new patchlevel (0.95-26) of my memisc package is on CRAN now.
The following changes were made since the last patchlevel:
2010-03-11:
- fixed bugs in mtable and format.mtable. Short 'summary.stats' arguments or 'summary.stats=FALSE' should work now.
2010-03-06:
- fixed bug in genTable/percentage: total counts disappeared if a factor level had the same name as the name given to the total count
- changed the default value of the 'digits' option of the matrix method of the toLatex generic to the more sensible getOption("digits")
- the matrix method of the toLatex generic gains new optional arguments 'show.vars', 'show.xvar', and 'show.yvar', which determine whether the name of the row and/or the column variable should be shown if the matrix is a 2-dimensional table.
R software uploads
Posted on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:20:02 +0000
Just finished the pages for some of my R packages (there's more to come). Packages memisc, munfold, and mcogit can now be found on my website.