multitable: a new R package for complex ecological data

From ECOLOG:

From: Steve Walker
Date: November 15, 2011 4:19:44 PM GMT+01:00
Subject: multitable: a new R package for complex ecological data
Reply-To: Steve Walker


Studies in contemporary community ecology make use of data from a wide
variety of sources, including information on dispersal barriers, functional
traits, species interactions, and spatiotemporal and phylogenetic
autocorrelation. The recognition of the importance of these factors has led
to complex multiple-table data structures. For a simple example, when both
environmental variables and functional traits are used to help understand
variation in community composition, one obtains a multiple-table data set
that cannot easily be organized into a standard data table with rows and
columns representing replicates and variables. Nevertheless, most
statistical tools require such a single-table data format. Storing
multiple-table data in a single table often results in either large numbers
of meaningless missing values or storage of redundant information. Even in
the more flexible R computing environment, storing complex data in multiple
tables (i.e. data frames in R-speak) often results in long difficult-to-read
workflows. My frustration with these issues led me to develop the
multitable package (on CRAN). This package introduces a new data object
called a data.list, which organizes several data tables as a single R
object. The primary goal of multitable is to provide a more intuitive
framework for manipulating multiple-table data in R. As data.lists can be
coerced to data.frames, they can be used with all R functions that accept an
object that is coercible to a data.frame (e.g. lm; plot; lme; and many
more). In essence, data.list objects work much like familiar data.frame
objects, but handle a richer variety of data structures.

Here are the package websites:
http://multitable.r-forge.r-project.org/
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/multitable/index.html

A quick introduction to multitable is here:
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/multitable/vignettes/multitable.pdf

I am very interested in constructive feedback, as I plan to continue to
develop multitable to meet new challenges that arise in multiple-table data
analysis -- particularly in ecology.

Steve Walker

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Steven C Walker
Postdoctoral researcher
Département de Sciences Biologiques
Université de Montréal
https://sites.google.com/site/stevencarlislewalker/
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