Error propagation

Andrej-Nikolai Spiess <a.spiess <at> uke.uni-hamburg.de> writes:

Dear R-helpers,

I??m in the context of writing a general function for error propagation
in R.
There are somehow a few questions I would like to ask (discuss), as my
statistical knowledge is somewhat restricted.
Below is the function I wrote, the questions are marked.
Many thanks in advance.

Permutations: why do you want permutations and not
combinations?  (i.e., order is unimportant for covariances)

  Bartlett's test: seems like overkill.  I would say (in the
R spirit) that people should use some common sense if they
are trying to use the delta method/Gaussian error propagation

   It certainly makes sense to use the covariance, if you
have covariance information.

  I haven't looked at the rest of this terribly carefully --
you could look at ?deltamethod, ?deltavar in the emdbook
package (available from CRAN) as a comparison ...

  cheers
    Ben Bolker