Test for akima replacement proposal

[rsbivand]

Students interested in working on the akima replacement proposal should send me off-list answers to this test:

Set up and document a benchmarking test to be able to see whether the future replacement package for akima performs in the same ways as the package being replaced. This benchmarking test is essential so that when implementing the new package, we'll know to what extent other packages can depend on it. The test may be very simple, but it should span the use cases adequately.

Detailed points:

Review and analyse the use of the functions in the akima package in a sample of packages in CRAN, the comprehensive R archive network. Use of awk/sed on files in the man/ directories of the packages using akima may be a good way in - spotting and extracting uses of functions in akima; the source packages are all on CRAN in predictable locations for a given mirror.

I attach a text file to load into R giving the names of packages that depend on, import or suggest akima (March 18, 2013). Reading the R admin. manual may show how the package system works; the pkgDepTools package from Bioconductor was used here to analyse the dependency tree of packages and generate the two character (string) vectors of names, which may not be unique.

Some uses are trivial, not altering the defaults used in the akima package, but others permit the user to modify arguments, and these will be the best test of a drop-in replacement.

The test will be to set up an effective benchmark, so that we can know to what extent the drop-in replacement gives users the same or similar results, and the same or similar control over the results.

Of course, the examples in the help files in the akima package itself are a good place to start, but the other packages using akima may exercise it ways not anticipated by the package authors.

Roger Bivand

[rsbivand]

I suggest that the test submission be an R script running examples from akima and a selection of its dependent packages such that the objects created when running the script (possibly saved to an RData file), and the text output of the script, can be compared for differences from the output when running the same script with the new implementation substituted for akima. Paste your script into the student application form. If you need further clarification, contact me directly.