numbat-collective

[numbat-collective]

Greetings, comrades!

The wise and powerful forecast package, a proudly Australian product, has developed a devoted following over many years. Now it is under attack. A New Zealand R hacker is promoting a package called forcats, in a deliberate and malicious typosquatting attack.

In cooperation with the pavlovR project, we have prototyped four packages to be launched as a proportionate retaliation to this threat. 

forecats: Given genotype data on a set of cats, the package uses the BEAST phylogenetics system to estimate their ancestry, and interfaces with Google Image Search to find pictures approximating the appearance of all the ancestral cats. 

forcast: A new idiom for parallel programming in R, where a for() loop has cast() and gather() expressions representing work to be performed in each subtask and how to accumulate the results.

fortacs: The American Community Survey collects data from millions of households every year, and is too large for interactive analysis in R. This package dynamically writes and compiles efficient Fortran code for each analysis.

forkhats: An approach to multicore statistical estimation.  Maximum likelihood estimation of a parameter $\theta$ is split up among cores, with efficient memory sharing from the copy-on-write model of fork. The resulting $\hat\theta$s from each core are then averaged to give an asymptotically efficient estimator.

This is just the beginning. We have not yet begun to fight!