How to search for a statistical procedure in R?

Question

Is there an R package, website, or command that will allow one to search for a specific statistical procedure they desire?

For instance, if I wanted to find a package that had the Box-Cox Transformation, the website/package/command might return "MASS" and refer me to the boxcox() function.

It is fairly straightforward with something like Box-Cox, but I was hoping it would allow me to find more difficult procedures or search by what the function does ("Concatenating columns to a data frame" might turn up cbind()). Does something like this exist?

score 13 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 24 '11 at 23:45

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The sos package lets you search the help documentation for all cran packages from within R itself.

answered Feb 24 '11 at 23:45

Mike Lawrence

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Oh no. You beat me to it. I will delete my answer! – suncoolsu Feb 24 '11 at 23:50

score 12 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:39

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rseek is pretty good. More abstract semantic queries along the lines of your second example are hard anywhere.

Also, see this SO thread from the R-faq listing there.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:39

Community

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answered Feb 24 '11 at 23:02

ashaw

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+1: That's a really useful SO thread there. Pretty much reduces my question to a repost :P. – Christopher Aden Feb 24 '11 at 23:53

score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 24 '11 at 23:36

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Sometimes I just go to crantastic and search for keywords

Search for Box Cox on Crantastic

answered Feb 24 '11 at 23:36

Btibert3

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score 4 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 24 '11 at 23:02

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I would try two things. One is the ?? help search in R, so for Box-Cox I would do

??cox

which should list packages or functions with that text

The other is to try the http://www.rseek.org/ site which is like google just for R.

answered Feb 24 '11 at 23:02

PaulHurleyuk

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How to search for a statistical procedure in R?

4 Answers4

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