[R-pkgs] Rattle 2.4.0 (Data Mining GUI using R)

[Graham Williams]

Version 2.4.0 of Rattle has been released to CRAN.

The rattle package (http://rattle.togaware.com) is a multi platform
(GNU/Linux, Mac/OSX, MS/Windows) GTK based GUI for data mining (for
exploring data and building descriptive and predictive models). It has
undergone a lot of development over the past year. A companion book
introducing data mining using Rattle is under development, with a
draft available for review at:

  http://datamining.togaware.com/survivor/index.html.

Rattle is regularly updated and intermediate releases (between the
more stable CRAN releases) are always available using:

  install.packages("rattle", repos="http://rattle.togaware.com")

Rattle builds upon many R packages. Full installation instructions are
provided at:

  http://datamining.togaware.com/survivor/Installing_Rattle.html

Recent updates include:

* Many bug fixes, GUI simplifications, improved colour usage (through
  the vcd package).

* Streamlined handling of datasets (combined the Data and Select
  tabs), including support for CSV, ARFF, and ODBC data sources.

* Addition of Test and Transforms tabs, with scripting support for
  transforms, both in building a model and in scoring.

* Experimental support for automatic report generation using odfWeave
  (and hence, generation of OpenOffice documents).

* Supported modelling includes: 
  - Cluster (kmeans, hclust)
  - Association Rules (arules)
  - Linear Models (lm, glm)
  - Trees (rpart, party)
  - Neural Nets (nnet)
  - Support Vector Machines (ksvm)
  - Boosting (ada)
  - Random Forests (randomForest)

* Supported data exploration tools include GGobi and PlayWith
  (latticist).  

* ROC curves, CostCurves, and many standard plots are supported.

* Export to PMML is supported for many models, allowing R (and hence
  Rattle) models to be readily exported to other tools (see
  http://www.zementis.com)

* The Business Intelligence vendor, Information Builders
  (http://ibi.com), will soon release RStat (sharing Rattle's open
  source code base) for data mining within WebFocus. Models built
  using RStat are deployable via PMML on all WebFocus hardware
  platforms (over 30 hardware and operating system platforms).

A complete change log is available from 

  http://code.google.com/p/rattle/source/list

Comments, bugs, suggestions are always welcome.

Regards,
Graham