[R] First attempt to use R

[Roland Rau]

Hi Ted,

hopefully the following information gets you started:

Ted wrote:
> What I want to do is extract time series data from a database(say, PostgreSQL 
> or MySQL - I routinely use both), analyse it, and put a selection of the 
> statistical results into specific tables.

Check the following document: 
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-data.html
The R Data Import/Export Manual. There is a section on Relational Databases.
Please check also the available packages here:
http://cran.wustl.edu/web/packages/index.html (or from any other CRAN 
mirror).
There is, for example, a package called RMySQL which will probably help 
you (but there are also others RODBC, DBI, RSQLite, DBI, ...)
There is even a special interest group for databases (R-SIG-DB).


> 
> For example, suppose I have daily values for several variates.  One thing I 
> might try is to fit a cubic spline to the data, 
Please check also the listing of available packages (URL given above). 
There seem to be quite a few spline-related packages. Please note that 
there is a function
smooth.spline
included in the packages 'stats' (part of the standard installation of R)


I hope this helps,
Roland