[Rd] Native implementation of rowMedians()

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 14 May 2007, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:

> On 5/14/07, Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>> 
>> > Hi Henrik,
>> >>>>>> "HenrikB" == Henrik Bengtsson <hb at stat.berkeley.edu>
>> >>>>>>     on Sun, 13 May 2007 21:14:24 -0700 writes:
>> >
>> >    HenrikB> Hi,
>> >    HenrikB> I've got a version of rowMedians(x, na.rm=FALSE) for 
>> matrices that
>> >    HenrikB> handles missing values implemented in C.  It has been

[...]

>> Also, the 'a version of rowMedians' made me wonder what other version
>> there was, and it seems there is one in Biobase which looks a more
>> natural home.
>
> The rowMedians() in Biobase utilizes rowQ() in ditto.  I actually
> started of by adding support for missing values to rowQ() resulting in
> the method rowQuantiles(), for which there are also internal functions
> for both integer and double matrices.  rowQuantiles() is in R.native
> too, but since it has much less CPU milage I wanted to wait with that.
> The rowMedians() is developed from my rowQuantiles() optimized for
> the 50% quantile.
>
> Why do you think it is more natural to host rowMedians() in Biobase
> than in one of the core R packages?  Biobase comes with a lot of
> overhead for people not in the Bio-world.

Because that is where there seems to be a need for it, and having multiple 
functions of the same name in different packages is not ideal (and even 
with namespaces can cause confusion).

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595