[R] New Package: TeachingDemos

[Greg Snow]

This is to announce the new package TeachingDemos now available on
CRAN.

This is a collection of functions that I have used to demonstrate
different ideas in various classes taught.  Some of the first ones I
wrote just to help me visualize what was happening, they latter were
usefull in teaching others (both in a 1 on 1 setting, and in classroom
type settings).  

A few examples (more are available in the package):

loess.demo:  This was one of the first I wrote, mainly for myself, but
others have liked it also.  This function creates a scatterplot and
shows the loess fit, then when you click on a point in the plot it shows
the window around that point, the weights used for the local regression
at that point and the local regression used to predict at that point. 
Additional clicks will show the same info for other x-values.

vis.gamma, vis.binom, vis.norm, and vis.t:  These functions plot the
given distribution (and related distributions) then creates a Tk slider
box that allows you to change the parameters to see how the distribution
function changes.  With overlayed plots you can also see the
relationship between related distributions.

put.points.demo:  Start with a scatterplot that shows the correlation
coefficient and least squares line, then add, delete, move points
interactively to see how the correlation and regression line change.

Hopefully others will find these demonstrations useful, let me know if
you have any suggestions for additional demonstrations or improvements
on the current ones.


Greg Snow, Ph.D.
Statistical Data Center, LDS Hospital
Intermountain Health Care
greg.snow at ihc.com
(801) 408-8111