R Foundation for Statistical Computing

Web Page: http://www.r-project.org/soc09

Mailing List: http://www.r-project.org/mail.html

The R Foundation is a not for profit organization working in the public interest. It has been founded by the members of the R Development Core Team in order to

• Provide support for the R project and other innovations in statistical computing. We believe that R has become a mature and valuable tool and we would like to ensure its continued development and the development of future innovations in software for statistical and computational research.
• Provide a reference point for individuals, instititutions or commercial enterprises that want to support or interact with the R development community.
• Hold and administer the copyright of R software and documentation.

R is an official part of the Free Software Foundation's GNU project, and the R Foundation has similar goals to other open source software foundations like the Apache Foundation or the GNOME Foundation.

Among the goals of the R Foundation are the support of continued development of R, the exploration of new methodology, teaching and training of statistical computing and the organization of meetings and conferences with a statistical computing orientation.

Projects

• "You can't control what you can't measure" This project is divided into two tasks. First, the aim is the implementation of software metrics, such as lines of code, code coverage and other metrics, to provide support for analysis of existent R packages. The second task is the creation of a CRAN software metrics monitor. That is, a service that continuously calculates software metrics over CRAN packages and provides the resulting (raw) data.
• Development of crantastic.org Due to the large amount of packages available for R, it can be hard for users to get an overview of available packages. The goal of this project is to remedy this by providing users with tools for browsing the package repositories in intuitive and useful ways. I've done some work on the site already, viewable on http://github.com/Chrononaut/crantastic/tree/master A PDF version of my proposal is available at http://obvcode.net/r-gsoc-application.pdf
• Implementation of the GUIDE algorithm In my project I plan to implement the statistical classification and regression tree algorithm GUIDE [1] based on the existing partykit infrastructure on R-Forge. GUIDE has negligible bias in split variable selection and is sensitive to curvature and local pairwise interactions between regressor variables, only to mention a few advantages. Since GUIDE is not implemented in R yet, my project aims to make it available to the R community. [1] http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~loh/guide.html
• RQuantLib - Bridging R and QuantLib Since statistical computing plays a major role in all financial modeling and risk-management tasks, it is highly desirable to combine the features and power of R and QuantLib. This project aims to provide a major extension to the existing RQuantLib package, includes expanding instruments coverage and integrating R's graphical engine for better visualization of modeling.