[R] Novice Questions

[Spencer Graves]

Hi, Bruce:

	  I'm overwhelmed.  Questioners seem to get quicker, more informative 
responses to questions that are short, well written and easily and 
quickly understood, and preferably include a toy example that someone 
else can run quickly to reproduce the problem and to evaluate 
alternative solutions.

	  I see you are using "source" and would like to get more output.  Did 
you check "?source"?  This function in R has arguments "echo" and 
"verbose", which may produce what you want.  If you've already tried 
that, then the problem may be output buffering, and I don't know how to 
modify that parameter.  A search of "www.r-project.org" -> search -> "R 
Site Search" might help.  Or ask a question focused specifically on 
that, giving also which version of R you are using under which operating 
system.

	  I rarely use "source".  More often, I have R commands in another file 
and copy and paste into R the commands I want to run.  That makes it 
easier for me to isolate errors, etc.

	  This does not address all your questions, but it's a start.

Hope this helps.
spencer graves

Bruce Moore wrote:
> I'm writing a program to perform linear regressions to
> estimate the number of bank teller transactions per
> hour of various types based upon day of week, time of
> day, week of month and several prices.  I've got about
> 25,000 records in my dataset, 85 columns of
> transaction counts (used 1 at a time), about 50
> columns of binary indicators (day, week, pay period,
> hour, branch), and a half dozen real valued prices.
> 
> My program hangs on some regressions as I add
> interactions, probably due to logic problems in my
> code or collinearity problems in the data.
> 
> 1) I'm running my program via the source() command. 
> It appears that source() does not print any messages
> until it completes.  
> 
> ---->Is there a way to get diagnostic messages to
> print immediately rather than when the source()
> command has completed?
> 
> 2) I'm fairly certain that I've got some collinearity
> in the data set and the interactions.  I've found an
> append (Ott Toomet 5/30/2003) that talks about a
> procedure to find collinearity problems using
> model.matrix() to generate the dataset with
> interactions and kappa() to determine the condition
> number of the matrix.  
> 
> ---->Is there a more automated way to find collinear
> variables?
> 
> 3) Is there a way to get lm() and/or step() or some
> other package to give a model with only coefficients
> that are significant at a particular level?
> 
> 4) Is there a way to suppress display of a password
> when using the RODBC odbcConnect() function, or to get
> the function to prompt for a password?
> 
> 5) What is the practical size limit on the number of
> terms in model?  I know that I won't be able to
> consider all interactions, but would like to have some
> idea when to give up and go with what I've got.
> 
> 
> 
> =====
> Bruce Moore
> 
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