[Rd] Developmental version of Matrix package for R-1.9.0

[Roger D. Peng]

The packages builds, loads, and passes R CMD check fine on 
our (64-bit) AMD Opteron machine running SuSE Linux 8.0 and 
gcc 3.2.2.  I used

 > version
          _
platform x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
arch     x86_64
os       linux-gnu
system   x86_64, linux-gnu
status   Under development (unstable)
major    1
minor    9.0
year     2004
month    01
day      29
language R


Hope this helps,

-roger

Douglas Bates wrote:
> I recently uploaded a developmental version of the Matrix package,
> Matrix_0.6-1.tar.gz, to CRAN where it is in the
> src/contrib/1.9.0/Other directory.  It requires some of the packages
> that will appear in R-1.9.0.
> 
> This version marks a major redesign of the Matrix package to use S4
> classes and methods and to incorporate sparse matrix manipulations
> using routines from TAUCS (http://www.tau.ac.il/~stoledo/taucs/),
> Metis (http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~karypis/metis/) and UMFPACK
> (http://www.cise.ufl.edu/research/sparse/umfpack).
> 
> Although this package is very much a work in progress and the
> documentation is, shall we say, sketchy, there are two vignettes
> included with the package.  One of these illustrates the performance
> of different ways of performing least squares calculations, using an
> example from Koenker and Ng's SparseM package.  The results are, I
> think, impressive.
> 
> Although not documented in this release, there are the beginnings of
> routines to represent large, sparse, pairwise crosstabulations as
> sparse matrices.  I am using these in calculations for mixed-effects
> models and I understand that others may be interested in them for
> other applications.  I would be happy to correspond off-list if you
> would like a preview of the capabilities.
> 
> Metis is a package for partioning unstructured graphs, partitioning
> meshes, and computing fill-reducing orderings of sparse matrices.
> Although the entire source code for Metis is included in the Matrix
> package I am only using one of the functions for computing
> fill-reducing orderings.  Perhaps those who are working on graphical
> models may want to look at some of the other capabilities of Metis.
> Certainly it provides standard ways of representing and manipulating
> unstructured graphs.
> 
> I've only compiled and tested the package on Linux_x86 environments.
> I will be interested in whether Uwe is successful in building it for
> Windows and whether there are problems on 64-bit machines.