cpr: Control Polygon Reduction

An R package for implementing the Control Polygon Reduction model selection method. When we are tasked with modeling the functional relationship between a response and a continuous predictor, i.e., y = f(x), CPR allows for quick and efficient searching of a large model space to find B-spline estimates of the function f(x).

CPR extends to multiple dimensions and allows one to find good locations for knots in a tensor product of B-splines.

Learn More About CPR.

This model selection method was developed as part of Peter DeWitt's PhD dissertation work.

Vignettes

There is one vignette included with the package, for now. Additional details will be added to this vignette.

vignette('cpr-pkg', package = 'cpr')

Additional vignettes may also be authored soon.

Related Publications:

• The CPR method was presented at the 28th International Biometric Conference held July 2016, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The abstract, paper, and talk had the title: "Parsimonious B-splines Regression Models via Control Polygon Reduction." A bibtex entry for the abstract:

@inproceedings{,
  author       = {DeWitt, Peter E. and Carlson, Nichole E. and Samantha MaWhinney},
  title        = {Parsimonious B-spline Regression Models via Control Polygon Reduction},
  booktitle    = {Abstracts for the XXVIIIth International Biometric Conference},
  month        = {July},
  year         = {2016},
  organization = {International Biometric Society},
  address      = {Victoria, British Columbia},
  url          = {http://www.biometricsociety.org/conference-abstracts/2016/},
  isbn         = {978-0-9821919-4-1}
}

Awards: The presentation of the work earned Peter DeWitt two awards:

1. "Best Student Oral Presentation" from the International Biometric Society (IBS).
2. "Distinguished Oral Presentation" as part of the student paper competition hosted by the Western North American Region (WNAR) of the IBs.

Installing CPR

Options for installing CPR: 1. Install from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN)

# within R
install.packages("cpr", repos = "https://cran.rstudio.com")

2. Install the developmental version from github. This will require you to have devtools installed, and, if you are using Windows, you'll need Rtools installed as well.

library(devtools)
install_github("dewittpe/cpr", build_vignettes = TRUE)

3. Clone the repo and use GNU make

make install

4. Go to the release page and down load the tar.gz file of the version you want to install.

• Install from the command line

R CMD INSTALL cpr_<version>.tar.gz

• Within R

install.packages(<path_to_file>, repos = NULL, type="source")

Other Notes:

The cpr package provides 3D graphics via the rgl package. If you are get an error, or rather message, of the form:

  font family "sans" not found, using "bitmap"

Then there is an easy fix. You need to get the FreeType 2 font engine.

On Debian, you can get the library via:

apt-get install libfreetype6-dev

Once the FreeType 2 font engine has been installed on your computer you must reinstall the rgl package.