On 08/18/04 12:16, Cliff Lunneborg wrote: >My experience has been that the real challenge is not understanding the >documentation, but finding it. Once I know the names of one or more >candidate functions I am happily on my way. One of the delights of >reading r-help is that one keeps discovering useful functions. In the >best of all possible worlds I could ask an intelligent agent to summon >up the k-nearest neighbor functions that would "do X."
I have found the HtDig search engine at my site (accessible through "Search" on the left side of the main R page, or directly as http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu) to be pretty useful in this regard, although it is a long way from artificial intelligence, which would recognize similar meanings. It fails for me mostly when different disciplines have different names for the same thing. (Economists hate to admit that many of the statistical ideas they use were invented/discovered by psychologists.) That said, I'm thinking of switching to the Xapian search engine (http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-July/msg01576.html), and I would welcome any opinions about it. HtDig is a pain; only one version of it (an old one) seems to work on Fedora Core 2, and it now takes almost 10 hours to update each month on a very fast computer (Pentium 4 2.80GHz with Serial ATA disk controller). Jon -- Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
