I'd like to have an R program that allows users to design regression equations by dragging variables around in a canvas, to interactively build path diagrams that lead to regressions. The diagrams would generate code that would run, and then results would somehow be linked to the drawings, perhaps showing coefficients on the edges or such.
I'd like this thing to facilitate multilevel modeling if possible, but I'd settle to just have a pallet of variable "nodes" that can be pulled out of a box on the side and re-positioned in the canvas, with arrows pointing in and out. If that could generate code to run glm, I'd be happy. Then I'd like to generalize this so that the nodes could represent latent variables in a structural equation model. Maybe I'd fiddle it up to write code for fitting with lavaan's estimators. Has anybody tried to do such a thing? Anybody know where to start? If you were doing this, which of the graphical programming environments would you suggest? I want this to work more-or-less well on all platforms. I've Googled enough to know it is not easy to decide which path to follow. My first idea was to imitate the design of programs that draw mind maps, but they are mostly based on Java, which in my experience is hard to support for diverse platforms. Still, the JGR project seems to do well with it, so I'm not absolutely opposed. I've been looking at GTK2, QT4, WXwidgets and tcltk. Judging from what I read in the email lists of various development projects, perhaps QT4 is the least troublesome multi-platform gui library, but it is not entirely open/free. QT, of course, is the underlying framework of the KDE desktop. My favorite editor, LyX, is written with QT, so I am sure it works. The Gambit game theory project chose WX. It appears to me that tcltk is constantly on the brink of extinction, and yet new versions pop out now and then. In WinBUGS, there's a graphical model designer called Doodle that is quite pleasing to me, but it seems there must be something wrong with it because nobody boasts about it very much :( pj -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science Assoc. Director 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 Center for Research Methods University of Kansas University of Kansas http://pj.freefaculty.org http://quant.ku.edu _______________________________________________ R-SIG-GUI mailing list R-SIG-GUI@r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-gui