The Quality & Accuracy of R

Hi All,



We have all had to face skeptical colleagues asking if software made by
volunteers could match the quality and accuracy of commercially written
software. Thanks to the prompting of a recent R-help thread, I read, "R:
Regulatory Compliance and Validation Issues, A Guidance Document for the
Use of R in Regulated Clinical Trial Environments
(http://www.r-project.org/doc/R-FDA.pdf). This is an important document,
of interest to the general R community. The question of R's accuracy is
such a frequent one, it would be beneficial to increase the visibility
of the non-clinical  information it contains. A document aimed at a
general audience, entitled something like, "R: Controlling Quality and
Assuring Accuracy" could be compiled from the these sections:



1.      What is R? (section 4)

2.      The R Foundation for Statistical Computing (section  3)

3.      The Scope of this Guidance Document (section 2)

4.      Software Development Life Cycle (section 6)



Marc Schwartz, Frank Harrell, Anthony Rossini, Ian Francis and others
did such a great job that very few words would need to change. The only
addition I suggest is to mention how well R did in, Keeling & Parvur's
"A comparative study of the reliability to nine statistical software
packages, May 1, 2007 Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Vol.51,
pp 3811-3831.



Given the importance of this issue, I would like to see such a document
added to the PDF manuals in R's Help.



The document mentions (Sect. 6.3) that a set of validation tests, data
and known results are available. It would be useful to have an option to
run that test suite in every R installation, providing clear progress,
"Validating accuracy of t-tests...Validating accuracy of linear
regression...." Whether or not people chose to run the tests, they would
at least know that such tests are available. Back in my mainframe
installation days, this step was part of many software installations and
it certainly gave the impression that those were the companies that took
accuracy seriously. Of course the other companies probably just ran
their validation suite before shipping, but seeing it happen had a
tremendous impact.  I don't know how much this would add to download,
but if it was too much, perhaps it could be implemented as a separate
download.



I hope these suggestions can help mitigate the concerns so many non-R
users have.



Cheers,

Bob



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Bob Muenchen (pronounced Min'-chen),

Manager, Research Computing Support

U of TN Office of Information Technology

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