Session Title: Data Analysis and Numeric Processing

Organizer: Patrick Ball

(someone PLEASE format this later...)

Attendees:
 1. Phil Hodge
 1. JC Hsu
 1. Perry Greenfield
 1. R Kaplan
 1. M Mc''''''Farland
 1. Rick Grubin
 1. Robert Jedrzejen
 1. Jeff Mathews
 1. David Brown
 1. Erin Stantill
 1. Abhay Saxena

Session Notes:

Numeric doesn't do what we want
(although it's great for what it does do)

Patrick likes Stata
 * Many things can do what we want in SQL

A story by Patrick
Multiple systems estimation
 * Find intersections of lists
 * Create list of presence/absence in the other lists
 * Estimate what lies outside

Suggestion from Numarray folks
 * Use recarray
 * Mutable values, not mutable shape
 * Perry describes record arrays in detail (sorry, I didn't get this down...)

Suggestion by Jeff/Abhay
 * Use Metakit http://www.equi4.com/metakit/

Use R (like S-Plus)
 * http://www.r-project.org/
 * http://cran.r-project.org/
 * http://rpy.sourceforge.net/
 * http://www.omegahat.org/RSPython/index.html

R + Python has problems. Patrick tells of difficulties passing data
between Python and R, even simple stuff like small matrices -- R gives
back data errors (roughly: "I don't understand what this is").