Collaborative Research Projects between Insightful Corporation and the R
Community

David A. Henderson, Insightful Corporation

At Insightful Corporation, we are actively seeking avenues for
cooperation with researchers in computational statistical science.  Our
primary venue for this activity is creating packages that function in
both dialects of the S language and maintain an open source development
process.  We present three examples of this process in the hope that
their success will spur additional cooperative research projects.  S
+LARS is a new project aimed at developing least angle regression
methodology and analytics simultaneously for both R and S-PLUS using an
open source model and active collaborations between academic and
industrial institutions.  S+Fractal is a comprehensive toolkit to
analyze (so-called) fractal statistical structures found in many
real-world observations. To increase the use of S+Fractal and
dissemination of the technology, we are implementing the technology as
an R package are also writing a book about the methodology.  R-Genetics
is a collaborative project between several academic institutions and
pharmacogenomics and software industry partners to produce software for
statistical analysis using molecular markers.  The code from the
R-Genetics project will be included in the next BioConductor release
(likely labeled version 2.0) and currently includes analytics for
detecting linkage disequilibrium between molecular markers and
phenotypic events.  We will discuss briefly the proposed methodology of
each project, their development model and end goals, and identify ways
to promote active collaboration between Insightful and the R community.