The R Commander: A Basic-Statistics Graphical User Interface to R

By John Fox. 2005

1,087 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Unlike S-PLUS, R does not incorporate a statistical graphical user interface (GUI), but it does include tools for building GUIs. Based on the tcltk package (which furnishes an interface to the Tcl/Tk GUI toolkit), the Rcmdr package provides a basic-statistics graphical user interface to R called the "R Commander." The design objectives of the R Commander were as follows: to support, through an easy-to-use, extensible, cross-platform GUI, the statistical functionality required for a basic-statistics course (though its current functionality has grown to include support for linear and generalized-linear models, and other more advanced features); to make it relatively difficult to do unreasonable things; and to render visible the relationship between choices made in the GUI and the R commands that they generate. The R Commander uses a simple and familiar menu/dialog-box interface. Top-level menus include File, Edit, Data, Statistics, Graphs, Models, Distributions, Tools, and Help, with the complete menu tree given in the paper. Each dialog box includes a Help button, which leads to a relevant help page. Menu and dialog-box selections generate R commands, which are recorded in a script window and are echoed, along with output, to an output window. The script window also provides the ability to edit, enter, and re-execute commands. Error messages, warnings, and some other information appear in a separate messages window. Data sets in the R Commander are simply R data frames, and can be read from attached packages or imported from files. Although several data frames may reside in memory, only one is "active" at any given time. There may also be an active statistical model (e.g., an R lm or glm ob ject). The purpose of this paper is to introduce and describe the use of the R Commander GUI; to describe the design and development of the R Commander; and to explain how the R Commander GUI can be extended. The second part of the paper (following a brief introduction) can serve as an introductory guide for students who will use the R Commander.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Biomedical Engineering, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4eafe9e5e202cdf9eb215b8c780e2ca635dff73a

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Citations in the corpus

ppcor: An R Package for a Fast Calculation to Semi-partial Correlation Coefficients (2015, methodology): “The function partial.cor() is included in Rcmdr (Fox, 2005) package for computing partial correlations.”
Log-Shape Ratios, Procrustes Superimposition, Elliptic Fourier Analysis: Three Worked Examples in R (2013, background): “R comes at first with a command line, but some more interactive graphical interfaces with buttons have been developed for users who are not familiar with R language (the R commander GUI that can be installed with the Rcmdr package (Fox, 2005), for instance).”
JASP: Graphical Statistical Software for Common Statistical Designs (2019, background): “For example, R Commander (Fox 2005), Deducer (Fellows 2012), and RKward (Rödiger et al. 2012) all output intermediate R code.”
FactoMineR: An R Package for Multivariate Analysis (2008, methodology): “Finally we wanted to provide a package user friendly and oriented towards the practitioner which is what led us to implement our package in the Rcmdr package (Fox 2005).”
Genomic Prediction of Genetic Values for Resistance to Wheat Rusts (2012, positive): “R project (R Development Core Team, 2008) and R Commander (Fox, 2005) were used to perform statistical or routine analyses.”
Closing the Gap between Methodologists and End-Users: R as a Computational Back-End (2012, methodology): “Our approach is similar in spirit to the R Commander package ( Rcmdr ), which provides an “easy-to-use, cross-platform, extensible GUI” with enough functionality to span a basic statistics course (Fox 2005).”
Assessing the suitability of a range of benthic indices in the evaluation of environmental impact of fin and shellfish aquaculture located in sites across Europe (2009, neutral): “The statistical analyses were performed by S-Plus 2000, R Commander (Fox, 2005) and CANOCO for Windows (ter Braak and Smilauer, 2002).”