Session Title: Data Analysis and Numeric Processing

Organizer: Patrick Ball

(someone PLEASE format this later...)

Attendees:

1. Phil Hodge
2. JC Hsu
3. Perry Greenfield
4. R Kaplan

5. M McFarland

6. Rick Grubin
7. Robert Jedrzejen
8. Jeff Mathews
9. David Brown
10. Erin Stantill
11. Abhay Saxena

Session Notes:

Numeric doesn't do what we want (although it's great for what it does do)

Patrick likes Stata

• Many things can do what we want in SQL

A story by Patrick Multiple systems estimation

• Find intersections of lists
• Create list of presence/absence in the other lists
• Estimate what lies outside

Suggestion from Numarray folks

• Use recarray
• Mutable values, not mutable shape
• Perry describes record arrays in detail (sorry, I didn't get this down...)

Suggestion by Jeff/Abhay

• Use Metakit http://www.equi4.com/metakit/

Use R (like S-Plus)

• http://www.r-project.org/

• http://cran.r-project.org/

• http://rpy.sourceforge.net/

• http://www.omegahat.org/RSPython/index.html

R + Python has problems. Patrick tells of difficulties passing data between Python and R, even simple stuff like small matrices -- R gives back data errors (roughly: "I don't understand what this is").