SA Progress Report: May 2013
Zelig
Zelig has had an overhaul to respond to mounting user issues with the release of Zelig version 4.
All known user issues in the core module have been fixed. These include:
- correct handling of missing data in summary statistics,
- correct handling of multiply imputed datasets when constructing quantities of interest.
- backwards compatibility in graphics calls ("plot.ci" function) to previous style, and increased graphics parameter tuneability (standard R "par" options enabled)
- more quantities of interest available for confidence interval plots.
- fixes to statistical models that were incorrectly ported from the previous Zelig 3
- additional exemplar R "demos" enabled
There is a feature request to better enable weights in core models, and when this is completed, Zelig 4.2 will be submitted to to CRAN, the general repository for R packages. The current version with corrections is available from the R repository here at IQSS.
Several bugs have been corrected in statistical models the supplementary module, ZeligChoice, and weights have been added to all available statistical models. Minor bugs have been corrected in ZeligMultilevel. These packages will be submitted to CRAN along with Zelig 4.2 as a set.
User Interface
In collaboration with off-campus partners, Zelig is being used as the engine to run a toolkit for robust, user-friendly, statistical inference for engineering trials data. Towards that end, a new user interface has been under research. A prototype written in Java, has now been rewritten in Javascript, using D3 graphics libraries.
