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

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 25/06/2012 4:13 PM, Paul Johnson wrote:
> 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.

One advantage of tcltk is that installation is easy:  R does it for you 
on Windows, and it's likely there on Linux.  Only MacOS needs a little 
user work, but not much.  RGtk2 has improved in the installation of 
support libs, but it is still a two-step process on Windows, and I would 
suspect it will fail for many users who don't have the right permissions.

Duncan Murdoch

>
> 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
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> R-SIG-GUI mailing list
> >> R-SIG-GUI at r-project.org
> >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-gui
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
> > 538280 at gmail.com
>
>
>