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CHAPTER 13 Beyond Basic Numerics and Statistics Introduction This chapter presents a few advanced techniques such as those you might encounter in the first or second year of a graduate program in applied statistics. Most of these recipes use functions available in the base distribution. Through add-on packages, R provides some of the world’s most advanced statistical techniques. This is because researchers in statistics now use R as their lingua franca, showcasing their newest work. Anyone looking for a cutting-edge statistical technique is urged to search CRAN and the Web for possible implementations. 13.1 Minimizing or Maximizing a Single-Parameter Function Problem Given a single-parameter function f, you want to find the point at which f reaches its minimum or maximum. Solution To minimize a single-parameter function, use optimize. Specify the function to be minimized and the bounds for its domain (x): optimize(f, lower=lowerBound, upper=upperBound) If you instead want to maximize the function, specify maximum=TRUE: optimize(f, lower=lowerBound, upper=upperBound, maximum=TRUE) Discussion The optimize function can handle functions of one argument. It requires upper and lower bounds for x that delimit the region to be searched. The following example finds 4 3 2 the minimum of a polynomial, 3x − 2x + 3x − 4x + 5: 335 f − function(x) 3*x^4 − 2*x^3 + 3*x^2 − 4*x + 5 optimize(f, lower=-20, upper=20) $minimum [1] 0.5972778 $objective [1] 3.636756 The returned value is a list with two elements: minimum, the x value that minimizes the function; and objective, the value of the function at that point. A tighter range for lower and upper means a smaller region to be se