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rgr: The GSC (Geological Survey of Canada) Applied Geochemistry EDA Package - R tools for determining background ranges and thresholds

R.G. Garrett and Y. Chen

October, 2007

Introduction

This Open File contains an archive of R functions for exploratory data analysis that were developed at the Geological Survey of Canada to assist in estimating the ranges of background concentrations, and threshold levels, for applied geochemical data.  R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics.  It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, and under Windows and MacOS.

Many people have created "packages" of statistical functions written in the R language.  These are accessible via the “Comprehensive R Archive Network” (CRAN); rgr is one such package. This Open File contains version 1.0.3 of rgr, released on CRAN in October, 2007.  Users should retrieve copies of rgr from CRAN, rather than use the one on this CD, to ensure that they have the most recent version.

The archived copy of rgr can be found on this CD in the file /rgr/rgr_1.0.3.tar.gz.  An identical copy of this file resides on CRAN.  The contents of the file are also accessible on the CD in uncompressed format in the directory /rgr/rgr.

rgr documentation (version 1.0.3)

All of the documentation for rgr is included in the package available from CRAN.  The following three pdf files are distributed with the package:

rgr release history

R package creation

Building an R package for redistribution via CRAN is a fairly involved process.  The procedure that was followed for creating the rgr package was carefully documented (pdf, doc).  The procedure depends on several software packages from different sources.  The URLs pointing to these resources will gradually become invalid, and alternative sources will have to be found.