[R] Kendall's tau

Peter Dalgaard BSA p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk
Thu Apr 25 11:42:59 CEST 2002


"Martin Henry H. Stevens" <HStevens at muohio.edu> writes:

> A search of the archives did not reveal an answer:
> For basic tests of association, where one has no a priori knowledge of
> the form of the relation or of the distributions of the variables,
> rank correlation seems like a good start. Why is cor.test() with
> Kendall and Spearman options relegated to the ctest package, rather
> than in the base package? Does this suggest that the developers
> consider other tests of association more generally useful?


No. *All* "classical tests" are in ctest. Also t.test for instance.
Arguably other stuff (e.g. lm/glm) ought to be moved away from base
and automatically loaded upon startup in the same way that ctest is,
leaving a "lean, mean, and clean" core, that could be used efficiently
in e.g. shell scripts. (R has a start-up time of about a second on
current hardware - give or take a few powers of 2, which is generally
tolerable unless running in a loop.)

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907
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