[R-sig-Geo] Prepping data for FlexScan

[VIRGILIO GOMEZ RUBIO]

Dear Paul,

> Here is the link to the user manual; there is an image of the matrix definition file on page 9.
> 
> https://sites.google.com/site/flexscansoftware/download_e/FleXScan%20User%20Guide_e31.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1
> 

It seems that all the files have the same format: ASCII file with values separated by a space. You can easily take a data.frame and get this type of output with write.table(). But you will need to feed it with the right variables, of course.

Also, you may want to check packages DCluster (on CRAN) and dclusterm (on r-forge). dclusterm is a model-based approach to cluster detection and will detect cluster after accounting for different types of covariates (quantitative and qualitative). FlexScan seems to only cope with categorical variables. We are working on dclusterm at the moment and we hope to make an official release on CRAN soon.

> Martin Kulldorff is on at least one of the publications with the Japanese group that designed FlexScan, which is a sign in its favor. He's never incorporated it into SatScan, however.

I think that Barry’s red flag is about Flexscan not being open-source…

In any case, this is probably something that could be included in DCluster and/or dclusterm. Not sure if this will be enough for a GSoC project but I will be happy to help.

Best,

Virgilio