{"id":813,"date":"2009-03-23T19:56:03","date_gmt":"2009-03-23T18:56:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=813"},"modified":"2009-04-09T10:20:51","modified_gmt":"2009-04-09T09:20:51","slug":"r-compared-to-matlab-or-learning-a-thing-or-two-from-your-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=813","title":{"rendered":"R Compared to MATLAB (or &#8216;learning a thing or two from your students&#8217;)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Near the end of last week I was acting as teaching assistant for a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mathworks.co.uk\/\">MATLAB<\/a> course and some of the students wanted to know if there were any viable free, open source alternatives to MATLAB.\u00a0 I duly listed what I considered to be the standard set &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scilab.org\/\">Scilab<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gnu.org\/software\/octave\/\">Octave<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sagemath.org\/\">SAGE<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.python.org\/\">Python<\/a> &#8211; which are more or less MATLABy depending on your point of view.<\/p>\n<p>One student asked &#8216;What about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.r-project.org\/\">R<\/a>?&#8217; and I had to confess that I didn&#8217;t know much about it except that it is used a lot by statisticians and is essentially a free, open source version of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/S-PLUS\">S+<\/a>.\u00a0 I ventured the opinion that maybe R was too specialised to be considered a general MATLAB alternative with the caveat that I didn&#8217;t actually know what I was talking about.<\/p>\n<p>It seems that there is nothing a student likes more than to teach the teacher and so much googling ensued.\u00a0 I was pointed to a small set of <a href=\"http:\/\/mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk\/dave\/rmbenchmark.php\">speed comparisons between MATLAB and R<\/a> for example which includes some matrix operations like finding eigenvalues and generating Toeplitz matrices.\u00a0 You don&#8217;t get much more MATLABy than matrices!\u00a0 Other articles such as this <a href=\"http:\/\/anyall.org\/blog\/2009\/02\/comparison-of-data-analysis-packages-r-matlab-scipy-excel-sas-spss-stata\/\">comparison between various data analysis packages<\/a> also proved interesting and useful.<\/p>\n<p>So, thanks to a line of questioning from some MATLAB students, I have yet another thing on my to-do list &#8211; find out more about R.\u00a0 What do you think?\u00a0 Can R replace MATLAB sometimes?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Near the end of last week I was acting as teaching assistant for a MATLAB course and some of the students wanted to know if there were any viable free, open source alternatives to MATLAB.\u00a0 I duly listed what I considered to be the standard set &#8211; Scilab, Octave, SAGE and Python &#8211; which are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,11,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math-software","category-matlab","category-open-source"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-d7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=813"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":998,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions\/998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}