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Matrix messages when loading lme4

3 messages · Christopher David Desjardins, Daniel Ezra Johnson

#
Hi,
I presume these messages are benign but I thought I'd find out what  
they are referring to ...

 > library(lme4)
Loading required package: Matrix
Loading required package: lattice

Attaching package: 'Matrix'


	The following object(s) are masked from package:stats :

	 xtabs


	The following object(s) are masked from package:base :

	 colMeans,
	 colSums,
	 rcond,
	 rowMeans,
	 rowSums



-----------------
Christopher David Desjardins
Ph.D. Student
Quantitative Methods in Education
Department of Educational Psychology
University of  Minnesota
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/desja004/educationalpsychology/
#
It means that the Matrix package includes functions with the names
listed, which as long as Matrix is loaded, supersede the original
versions of those functions in the base and stats packages.

If you look at one of the help pages, it should explain the change to
the function. Usually this is some additional functionality and the
function should be usable as before, if desired.

For example, ?xtabs (or ?Matrix::xtabs) gives this notice: "This is a
fully compatible extension of the standard stats package xtabs()
function with the added option to produce a sparse matrix result via
sparse = TRUE."

Hope this helps,
Dan
#
Thanks that's very helpful.
Chris
On Dec 27, 2008, at 1:06 PM, Daniel Ezra Johnson wrote:

            
-----------------
Christopher David Desjardins
Ph.D. Student
Quantitative Methods in Education
Department of Educational Psychology
University of  Minnesota
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/desja004/educationalpsychology/