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Is there an R package, website, or command that will allow one to search for a specific statistical procedure they desire?

For instance, if I wanted to find a package that had the Box-Cox Transformation, the website/package/command might return "MASS" and refer me to the boxcox() function.

It is fairly straightforward with something like Box-Cox, but I was hoping it would allow me to find more difficult procedures or search by what the function does ("Concatenating columns to a data frame" might turn up cbind()). Does something like this exist?

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4 Answers

up vote 11 down vote accepted

rseek is pretty good. More abstract semantic queries along the lines of your second example are hard anywhere.

Also, see this SO thread from the R-faq listing there.

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+1: That's a really useful SO thread there. Pretty much reduces my question to a repost :P. – Christopher Aden Feb 24 '11 at 23:53
up vote 11 down vote

The sos package lets you search the help documentation for all cran packages from within R itself.

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Oh no. You beat me to it. I will delete my answer! – suncoolsu Feb 24 '11 at 23:50
up vote 4 down vote

Sometimes I just go to crantastic and search for keywords

Search for Box Cox on Crantastic

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up vote 3 down vote

I would try two things. One is the ?? help search in R, so for Box-Cox I would do

??cox

which should list packages or functions with that text

The other is to try the http://www.rseek.org/ site which is like google just for R.

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