Using Packages to Apply Advanced Models

In the first seven chapters of this book, we have treated R like a traditional statistical software program and reviewed how it can perform data management, report simple statistics, and estimate a variety of regression models. In the remainder of this book, though, we turn to the added flexibility that R offers—both in terms of programming capacity that is available for the user as well as providing additional applied tools through packages. In this chapter, we focus on how loading additional batches of code from user-written packages can add functionality that many software programs will not allow. Although we have used packages for a variety of purposes in the previous seven chapters (including car, gmodels, and lattice, to name a few), here we will highlight packages that enable unique methods. While the CRAN website lists numerous packages that users may install at any given time, we will focus on four particular packages to illustrate the kinds of functionality that can be added.

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