[RsR] port of LIBRA toolbox to R

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "ValenT" == Valentin Todorov <valentin.to using gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Mon, 5 Feb 2007 18:49:14 +0100 writes:

    ValenT> (just a short comment, to show that we are still alive, although quite)

:-) thank you, Valentin

    [........]

    ValenT> Also, I do not remember if Martin mentioned this,
    ValenT> the cluster analysis methods of LIBRA are included
    ValenT> in the recommended R package 'cluster', again in
    ValenT> native C and FORTRAN code.

I didn't mention it because it's not directly related to
robustness and also because I'm the maintainer of the 'cluster'
package. Since you mention it, let me say that indeed 'cluster'
has been *considerably* enhanced (and de-bugged) from the
original S-plus & Fortran code of Kaufman,Rousseeuw et al.

    ValenT> I have implementations of linear discriminant analysis (using not only
    ValenT> MCD, but also OGK M and S estimates, see the above presentation) as
    ValenT> well as of PCA, based on projection pursuit and MCD (ala ROBPCA) which
    ValenT> I intend to release soon in rrcov.

good!

    ValenT> By the way, Martin when do you expect to deliver robustbase as a
    ValenT> recommended package? 

Well, that's not my decision! It's the R-core team's decision
about which - very few - R packages become recommended and are "packed
with the R distribution"; so this will not simply happen.
If continue to aim having robustbase in a a formidable state within
this year (say) -- not the least thanks to the contributions
from people on this mailing list! -- there will at least be more
good reasons to consider a 'recommended' state.

But note that this is not really necessary:
Your package rrcov (or many others) can simply
have a 'Depends: robustbase' in their DESCRIPTION file 
[and probably an 'Imports: robustbase' with e.g. Import("robustbase")
in NAMESPACE] such that people who install rrcov automatically
also install robustbase (if they install via the windows- or mac-GUI, or use
  install.packages(....., dependencies = TRUE) or work in R
version 2.5.0 [to be released in 2 months] or newer where the
default is 'dependencies = NA' which installs such dependencies typically.

    ValenT> I still have not released a version of rrcov without
    ValenT> covMcd, ltsReg and related functions and requiring robustbase.

(and probably without those datasets that I've ported into
 robustbase).

Yes, I've remarked that and had been wondering a bit about the
reason.  I'd be glad if you'd made  rrcov depend on robustbase.
Having (many) other packages depend on one package makes that
``recommended'' at least informally..

Best regards,
Martin