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October 26, 2006
Rattle - data mining interface for R
The type of user interfaces we are used from data mining and machine learning are slowly appearing for the R environment. Today I found Rattle - a Gnome-based interface to R (via KDnuggets). While tools like Weka or Orange are still a generation ahead of Rattle, Rattle itself is quite a bit better for certain types of tasks, such as model evaluation, compared to the usual command line interface. Here's an example of ROC-based evaluation on various models on the same dataset:
One of the benefits of Rattle is that it also acts as a guide to various interesting R packages that I was not aware of earlier, and shows how they can be used: it generates a script created from the commands that were clicked graphically (something other systems could also do). The main downside of Rattle is that it only works with the latest version of R 2.4, but not with the earlier versions.
Posted by Aleks at October 26, 2006 2:13 PM
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Comments
Umm, earlier versions of Rattle did work with earlier versions of R.
Could it be that you hit a package with S4 methods (which changed in R 2.4.0) that required a reinstall?
Dirk
Posted by: Dirk Eddelbuettel at October 26, 2006 5:56 PM.
I know I'm being picky, but why is it a disadvantage that Rattle only works in the latest version of R? Anybody can get the latest version for free, with little time investment.
Posted by: Ed at October 26, 2006 6:22 PM.
The problem arises when you have a package that is not yet available for the new version of R. Combine this with a package that's only available for the new version, and you're in trouble. I've had problems of this type in the past. For that reason, it's helpful to keep the versions for older versions around.
Posted by: Aleks ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/nav-commenters.gif)
at October 26, 2006 8:45 PM.
I always keep old version of R when I install new one. I also keep all the old versions of packages. So I newer have such problems. It is dead easy.
Posted by: Gregor at October 26, 2006 11:51 PM.
Funny, that no one actually comments on the tool itself...
Many people feel the need to write some kind of GUI for R. Unfortunately, most of the tools create more problems than they actually solve, except for those of us who completely refuse to learn R.
I might be a bit too critical here, but writing an interface is more than just putting some widgets together. Understanding what the users-model is compared to (our) implementers-model is quite a task and needs much experience!
What I absolutely dislike about Rattle is the use of Gtk. Going cross-platform is far more attractive in Java - again, we should look at the users prespective.
Posted by: Martin Theus at October 27, 2006 10:54 AM.