On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Paul, David A wrote: > I am one of only 5 or 6 people in my organization making the > effort to include R/Splus as an analysis tool in everyday work - > the rest of my colleagues use SAS exclusively. > > Today, one of them made the assertion that he believes the > numerical algorithms in SAS are superior to those in Splus > and R -- ie, optimization routines are faster in SAS, the SAS
I can't say for the optimisation routines, but I have found this... When I was doing my MSc thesis, using tree-based models and neural networks for classifications, I discovered something interesting. Using SAS Enterprise Miner (SAS EM), its Tree Node is far more efficient than the rpart package. Using the same (or very similar at least) parameter settings, SAS EM can produce a tree in about 1 minute while it would take rpart 5 ~ 6 minutes (same data, same machine....). Having said that, I still prefer rpart as it can draw a beautiful tree, whereas it is very difficult to fit the graphical tree produced by SAS EM into one A4 page -- in the end I had to use the text tree. However, the Neural Network node in SAS EM is less efficient than nnet. The time it takes to fit a neural network in R using nnet is much faster.... -- Cheers, Kevin ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -- Charles Babbage (1791-1871) ---- From Computer Stupidities: http://rinkworks.com/stupid/ -- Ko-Kang Kevin Wang Master of Science (MSc) Student SLC Tutor and Lab Demonstrator Department of Statistics University of Auckland New Zealand Homepage: http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~kwan022 Ph: 373-7599 x88475 (City) x88480 (Tamaki) ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
