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The rPref Package

Database Preferences and Skyline Computation in R

Publications related to rPref

Resources on Skylines/preferenes

To learn more about Skylines and preferences, have a look at the following papers:

Related R resources

rPref uses the following R packages, which are worth considering beyond the scope of this package:
  • dplyr for quick and easy access to the most important data manipulation functions. Used in rPref for the grouping functionality.
  • Rgraphviz (only on Bioconductor) and igraph for drawing and manipulating graphs. Both are used in rPref for the plotting Better-Than-Graphs.
  • lazyeval for lazy evaluation used for the base preferences in rPref.
  • R6 for the R6 reference classes used to implement the preference objects.
The IDE I am using is RStudio, which I can highly recommend for working with R. The Shiny framework is also recommendable, which is used for the Shiny demos.

If you are interested to use rPref for Skyline calculation on SQL databases I recommend the RJDBC Package for JDBC access from R.

For more information about package development and/or implementing C++ algorithms for R have a look at:
  • The Rcpp package offering a very neat interface between R and C++. Typical R classes like data frames and vectors can be directly accessed in C++ and converted to the corresponding STL classes.
  • The "Advanced R" site from Hadley Wickham offering an excellent tutorial on advanced R practices and on the R/C++ interface. Additionally, he published a very recommendable "R Packages" tutorial on package development. rPref was written according to the guidelines of this tutorial and by using the developer packages devtools, testthat and roxygen2.

(Academic) applications

In the additional material to my PhD thesis I show some use cases based on rPref illustrating the theoretical results of my thesis.