Forum: open-discussion

RE: What's this project about? [ Reply ]
By: Will Beasley on 2012-04-23 18:57

Wow, thank you for such an insightful question.

Our overall project is intended to facilitate Behavior Genetics research, especially when coupled with the "National Longitudinal Surveys" (http://www.bls.gov/nls/). The kinship links are the centerpiece of our NIH-funded project. This dataset describes the relationships between NLSY subjects; accounting for this structured-dependence is critical to BG and other types of research. The kinship links can be used by any statistical software or estimation approach (eg, R, SAS, Mplus, OpenMx, lavaan, BUGS/JAGS, maximum likelihood, hierarchical Bayesian ... ).

Specifically for R, we developed the NlsyLinks package to assist researchers of all levels. For researchers relatively new to BG or the NLSY, our goal is to provide the kinship links and seamless documentation necessary for their initial ACE model; hopefully this reduces the time and confusion involved with initial model and interpretation. For experienced researchers, our goal is to provide software routines that assume responsibility for many of the mundane and error-prone tasks; hopefully this frees more time for the substantive aspects of their research.

The grant's PI (Joe Rodgers) has been using and distributing NLSY kinship links since the mid 1990s. Joe, David Bard, Kelly Meredith and I have been conducting research and developing this package since April 2011. Mike Hunter will join the project during it's second year of funding. The grant is scheduled to fund the package's development until May 2013. After that, the NIH and the University of Oklahoma Psychology Department are funding a part-time position to continue providing support for another year or two. Hopefully subsequent grants will support further development and user support.

We plan to use R-Forge for its forum capabilities and deploying development versions of the package. When a milestone is reached, the new version will be released on CRAN (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/NlsyLinks/). If the package is already installed on your computer, typing "update.packages()" in the console should update all your packages, including NlsyLinks.

Our team is interested in supporting others by participating in this forum's discussions. We have different interests and areas of expertise, and hope they will help. If you have questions or suggestions, we'd like to hear from you in these forums. If you have difficulty with R-Forge forums, please email me at wibeasley@hotmail.com. If you are interested in using the kinship links, but prefer not to use R, please see our forum dedicated to other types of statistical software (called "other-software"). If you'd like to direct someone to this area, send them to https://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/nlsylinks/, and ask them to click the "Forums" link near the top.

If this is your first introduction to this project, I suggest reading the "NlsyAce" and the "NlsInvestigator" vignettes available towards the bottom of our CRAN page: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/NlsyLinks/.

Welcome to the NlsyLinks project, Will Beasley

What's this project about? [ Reply ] By: Keisha Beasley on 2012-04-23 17:28	[forum:5643]
Hi, my husband asked me to register for the NlsyLinks project and R-Forge. He wanted to verify that I could start a new thread and post a message. What's the NlsyLinks package, and what kind of discussion topics belong here?