DSC-2007 Common Lisp talks by Ross Ihaka and Tony Rossini (R-Project)

Hello,

> Robert, thanks for sending the link. I've taken the liberty of
> forwarding this to the Maxima mailing list.
> I wish I could attend the conference!
> 
> > http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/dsc-2007/abstracts/program.html

A parallel world with R written in lisp? This sounds interesting.

Statistical procedures have been always designed from a purely numerical
point of view. Now we know that the R team is looking for some symbolic
features (there was some posts in this mailing list about switching from
yacas to maxima).

Symbolic environments should be very powerful tools in some
probabilistic contexts. For example, a cas with Lebesgue or Stieltjes
integrals could be used to compute probabilities both with discrete and
continuous models.

If the cas also incorporates a graph package, a possible application
could be in 'graphical models', these are random multivariate models
where stochastic dependencies are represented by graphs, both directed
or undirected, as in bayesian networks, or random fields. Sometimes
there are conditional dependencies among discrete and continuous random
variables. The likelihood function must be constructed and numeric
parameters (even the graph's structure) estimated from the sample.

I don't know if someone, somewhere, has started such a project.

My 2*10^-2 EU.

-- 
Mario Rodriguez Riotorto
www.biomates.net