John C. Nash, retired professor, Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa Arkajyoti Bhattacharjee, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur based on communications from Duncan Murdoch 11/06/2021, revised 19/01/2022 Background This article tries to explain an approach to developing alternative versions of functions which are in the distributed ... [Read more...]

There has been a campaign by members of the Canadian library community to ask international publishers to reduce prices to libraries for eBooks.  If my experience in the scientific publishing arena is any guide, the publishers will continue to charge the maximum they can get until the marketplace — that is ... [Read more...]

With over 11,000 packages in the main CRAN (Consolidated R Archive Network) collection, users of R face a challenge when looking for tools to carry out their statistical and computational tasks, especially in subject areas outside their main domain of expertise. Moreover, a lot of packages have similar or overlapping features. ... [Read more...]

A decision tree for function minimization What R calls “optimization” is more generally known as function minimization. The tools in the stats package function optim() are all essentially function mimizers, as are those in the package optimrx found at https://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/optimizer/. optimrx tries to make it ... [Read more...]

Why optim() is out of date And perhaps you should be careful using it Once upon a time Once upon a time, there was a young Oxford D.Phil. graduate with a thesis on quantum mechanics who — by virtue of a mixup in identities — got hired as an Agricultural Economist. ... [Read more...]