[R-gui] regression diagram builder thingie? Maybe like Doodle in Winbugs?

[Paul Johnson]

So, just to be blunt:

You like working with tcltk?

I mean, I know your package is written with it, but do like it? Do you
sometimes wish you were working with QT or GTK? That's the hard
decision for me at the moment.

pj


On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 12:19 PM, Greg Snow <538280 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Look at the TkIdentify function in the TeachingDemos package.  It does
> not do what you want completely, but it shows an example of dragging
> and dropping labels within a plot in R.  You could do something
> similar with your variable names to drag and drop them to different
> locations (and possibly arrows or lines).  Then you just need to
> decide how to use the position information to build your model.
> However, this seems rather complicated, how will you indicate
> interactions or non-linearity?  I could see this for very basic
> models, but not for more general ones.
>
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 2:05 PM, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'd like to have an R program that allows users to design regression
>> equations by dragging variables around in a canvas, to interactively
>> build path diagrams that lead to regressions. The diagrams would
>> generate code that would run, and then results would somehow be linked
>> to the drawings, perhaps showing coefficients on the edges or such.
>>
>> I'd like this thing to facilitate multilevel modeling if possible, but
>> I'd settle to just have a pallet of variable "nodes" that can be
>> pulled out of a box on the side and re-positioned in the canvas, with
>> arrows pointing in and out. If that could generate code to run glm,
>> I'd be happy.
>>
>> Then I'd like to generalize this so that the nodes could represent
>> latent variables in a structural equation model.  Maybe I'd fiddle it
>> up to write code for fitting with lavaan's estimators.
>>
>> Has anybody tried to do such a thing?  Anybody know where to start?
>>
>> If you were doing this, which of the graphical programming
>> environments would you suggest?  I want this to work more-or-less well
>> on all platforms. I've Googled enough to know it is not easy to decide
>> which path to follow.  My first idea was to imitate the design of
>> programs that draw mind maps, but they are mostly based on Java, which
>> in my experience is hard to support for diverse platforms. Still, the
>> JGR project seems to do well with it, so I'm not absolutely opposed.
>>
>> I've been looking at GTK2, QT4, WXwidgets and tcltk. Judging from what
>> I read in the email lists of various development projects, perhaps QT4
>> is the least troublesome multi-platform gui library, but it is not
>> entirely open/free.  QT, of course, is the underlying framework of the
>> KDE desktop.  My favorite editor, LyX, is written with QT, so I am
>> sure it works. The Gambit game theory project chose WX.  It appears to
>> me that tcltk is constantly on the brink of extinction, and yet new
>> versions pop out now and then.
>>
>> In WinBUGS, there's a graphical model designer called Doodle that is
>> quite pleasing to me, but it seems there must be something wrong with
>> it because nobody boasts about it very much :(
>>
>> pj
>> --
>> Paul E. Johnson
>> Professor, Political Science    Assoc. Director
>> 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504     Center for Research Methods
>> University of Kansas               University of Kansas
>> http://pj.freefaculty.org            http://quant.ku.edu
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
> 538280 at gmail.com



-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science    Assoc. Director
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504     Center for Research Methods
University of Kansas               University of Kansas
http://pj.freefaculty.org            http://quant.ku.edu