The Rcmdr (R Commander) package is a platform-independent graphical user interface (GUI) for R, based on the tcltk package (distributed with R) and on the Tcl/Tk GUI builder. Although GUIs for statistical software have serious limitations, the R Commander provides new and casual users of R the ability to access some of R's capabilities though an intuitive point-and-click interface. Designed originally with basic-statistics courses in mind, the R Commander has expanded beyond that purpose to encompass extensive facilities for fitting linear, generalized-linear, and some other statistical models. The R Commander is also extensible through “plug-in packages,” and a number of such packages have been contributed to the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). Along with the basic use of the R Commander, this presentation will demonstrate one such package, the RcmdrPlugin.survival package, which provides a GUI for many of the facilities of the survival package for survival analysis, which in turn is part of the standard R distribution.

Keywords: R; Graphical user interface; Survival analysis

Biography: John Fox is the Senator William McMaster Professor of Social Statistics in the Sociology Department of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Professor Fox earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan in 1972. He is the author of many articles a number of books on statistics, including most recently An R Companion to Applied Regression, Second Edition (coauthored with Sanford Weisberg) and Applied Regression Analysis and Generalized Linear Models, Second Edition. Professor Fox is a member of the R Foundation.