A new version 0.3 of HistogramTools is now on CRAN. HistogramTools provides a number of methods for manipulating histograms, measuring the distance between histograms, calculating the information loss due to binning aggregate data sets, and other tools useful for statistical analysis of binned/histogram data. It also uses RProtoBuf to provide a protocol buffer representations of the default R histogram class to allow histograms over large data sets to be computed and manipulated in a MapReduce environment with tools written in other languages.

The full list of updates includes :

• Moved ‘Hmisc’ from Depends to Imports.
• Improved introduction vignette significantly.
• Added ScaleHistograms function.
• Added PlotRelativeFrequency function to plot relative frequency histograms.
• Added minkowski.dist, intersect.dist, kl.divergence, jeffrey.divergence measures for two histograms.
• Added PreBinnedHistogram for creating histogram objects from an already binned dataset (e.g. just a vector of bins and counts).

Dirk’s CRANberries service provides a diff to the previous release 0.2. More information is at the HistogramTools page on CRAN which includes the 18-page package vignette and 1-page Quick Reference Guide. Please mail me directly with any questions or suggestions about this package.