A Common Platform for Graphical Models inR: ThegRbasePackage

The gRbase package is intended to set the framework for computer packages for data analysis using graphical models. The gRbase package is developed for the open source language, R, and is available for several platforms. The package is intended to be widely extendible and flexible so that package developers may implement further types of graphical models using the available methods. The gRbase package consists of a set of S version 3 classes and associated methods for representing data and models. The package is linked to the dynamicGraph package (Badsberg 2005), an interactive graphical user interface for manipulating graphs. In this paper, we show how these building blocks can be combined and integrated with inference engines in the special cases of hierarchical loglinear models. We also illustrate how to extend the package to deal with other types of graphical models, in this case the graphical Gaussian models.