Editorial S4 Classes for Distributions

Welcome to the first regular issue of R News for 2006. This is a bumper issue, with a thirteen contributed articles. Many thanks to the contributors and reviewers for all of the enthusiasm and effort that they put into these articles. This issue begins with some “methodological” papers. Peter Ruckdeschel, Matthias Kohl, Thomas Stabla, and Florian Camphausen introduce their distr package, which provides a set of S4 classes and methods for defining distributions of random variables. This is followed by an article from David Clifford and Peter McCullagh on the many uses of the regress package, then Lukasz Komsta describes his outliers package, which contains general tests for outlying observations. The next set of articles involve applications of R to particular settings. David Kane and Jeff Enos describe their portfolio package for working with equity portfolios. Roman Pahl, Andreas Ziegler, and Inke König discuss the GroupSeq package for designing clinical trials. Using Sweave in clinical practice is the topic of Sven Garbade and Peter Burgard’s article, while M. Wangler, J. Beyersmann, and M. Schumacher focus on length of hospital stay with the changeLOS package. Next, there are three graphics articles. Nitin Jain and Gregory Warnes describe the “balloonplot”, a tool for visualizing tabulated data. Jung Zhao explains how to produce pedigree plots in R, and Brian Ripley and I describe some improvements in R’s font support for PDF and PostScript graphics output. SAS users struggling to make the transition to R might enjoy Søren Højsgaard’s article on his doBy package and the contributed articles are rounded out by two pieces from Robin Hankin: one on the onion package for normed division algebras and one on theResistorArray package for analysing resistor networks. David Meyer provides us with a review of the book “R Graphics”. This issue accompanies the release of R version 2.3.0. Changes in R itself and new CRAN packages