Graphical modelling software in R - status

Graphical models in their modern form have been around for nearly a quarter of a century. Various computer programs for inference in graphical models have been developed over that period. Some examples of free software programs are BUGS (Thomas 1994), CoCo (Badsberg2001), Digram (Klein, Keiding, and Kreiner 1995), MIM (Edwards 2000), and Tetrad (Glymour, Scheines, Spirtes, and Kelley 1987). The gR initiative (Lauritzen 2002) aims at making graphical models available in R (R Development Core Team 2006). A small grant from the Danish Science Foundation supported this initiative. We will summarize the results of the initiative so far. Specifically we will illustrate some of the R packages for graphical modelling currently on CRAN and discuss their strengths and weaknesses.Graphical models in their modern form have been around for nearly a quarter of a century. Various computer programs for inference in graphical models have been developed over that period. Some examples of free software programs are BUGS (Thomas 1994), CoCo (Badsberg2001), Digram (Klein, Keiding, and Kreiner 1995), MIM (Edwards 2000), and Tetrad (Glymour, Scheines, Spirtes, and Kelley 1987). The gR initiative (Lauritzen 2002) aims at making graphical models available in R (R Development Core Team 2006). A small grant from the Danish Science Foundation supported this initiative. We will summarize the results of the initiative so far. Specifically we will illustrate some of the R packages for graphical modelling currently on CRAN and discuss their strengths and weaknesses