[OGRUG] Multi-agent modeling including geospatial data

R has several useful tools for dealing with and plotting geospatial data.
There may be speed considerations around data extraction, local calculation
or server, network speed, etc, as been discussed in the "Interactive
geospatial data with Leaflet ..." thread. Specific code examples can make it
a bit easier to focus on speed issues.

On the other part of Joseph's question, regarding multi-agent modelling, I
am not aware of good solutions in R. (That does not mean they don't exist
and I would be interested to hear if anyone knows of something.) Multi-agent
modelling covers a lot of things and this is not my field, but in the
examples I have seen there are two sorts of problems that make R less than
ideal. The first is that the problems do not easily "vectorize", which means
speed is a problem. Typically, even with compiled languages, speed is an
issue for these models and people are looking toward multi-core, cluster, or
GPU processing. The second is the need for a "language" to define the model.
These languages tend to be somewhat specialized to the problem domain. Once
you decide on a language to define the model, the underlying computer
language for doing the computation is largely hidden.

My approach to this would be to first consider the many already defined
languages for multi-agent modelling (see e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_agent-based_modeling_software),
and then look at whether an interface from R to one of these would be useful
for doing plotting, summary statistics, etc, with the existing modelling
software handling the main computation. I have done this sort of thing with
some econometric modelling software and it can be relatively simple. R is
fairly good at interfacing to other things.

Paul

On 05/27/2014 07:00 AM, Amin Adatia wrote:

I am interested in this as well. The kind of plot I looking to build
is for distribution of Health Effects (Disease, Mortality, etc) at
Locations and with a Time spread so we can see the progress or lack
thereof in the application of Health Services; For example, Cancer
Incidences over time and at various locations. This to perhaps
identify the effect of the environment and/or Treatments.


Regards Amin Adatia KnowTech Solutions Inc ( http://knowtech.ca )
Mobile +1-613-864-8378

--Forwarded Message Attachment-- From: jpotvin at opman.ca To:
r-ug-ottawa at r-project.org Date: Mon, 26 May 2014 10:36:49 -0400
Subject: [OGRUG] Multi-agent modeling including geospatial data

I am currently planning a multi-agent model that will include
geospatial input and output data. I have not done this before and
would be interested in some orientation from someone who is
experienced with the appropriate R packages.

-- Joseph Potvin
jpotvin at opman.ca