[Rcpp-devel] [ANN] New package Rmalschains (with initial version 0.1) and recent changes in RSNNS (current version 0.4-3)

[Christoph Bergmeir]

Hi Rcpp developers and users:

In the main point, this is to inform you about a new package that uses Rcpp:

Rmalschains: Continuous Optimization using Memetic Algorithms with Local Search Chains (MA-LS-Chains) in R

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Rmalschains/index.html

Rmalschains is basically a wrapper for a C++ library of a special type of memetic algorithms that is developed by my research group. The interface (and some of the code) is inspired by RcppDE, so that it should be pretty easy to give Rmalschains a try in existing applications that use RcppDE. I found the algorithm being pretty competitive, especially with respect to the number of function evaluations, i.e., it runs pretty fast. It is also promoted by my group for being especially suited for high-dimensional problems, so you can also give it a try there.

Feedback is appreciated.

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The other thing is that I use this opportunity to promote the last version of RSNNS, which was released on 2012-01-10. RSNNS is a wrapper for the Stuttgart Neural Network Simulator (SNNS), a pretty comprehensive neural network library. The new version contains updated citation info to an article that we published in the Journal of Statistical Software:

Bergmeir, C., Benítez, J.M.
Neural networks in R using the Stuttgart neural network simulator: RSNNS
(2012) Journal of Statistical Software, 46 (7)
http://www.jstatsoft.org/v46/i07/

The article hopefully can serve as an introduction to get started using the package, and provides technical background and starting points if you are interested in the theoretical background. If you use the package, please consider citing the article.

Kind regards,
Christoph

-- 
Christoph Bergmeir
e-mail: c.bergmeir at decsai.ugr.es
Grupo SCI2S, DiCITS Lab          (http://sci2s.ugr.es/DiCITS)
Dpto. de Ciencias de la Computacion e Inteligencia Artificial
E.T.S. Ingenierias de Informatica y Telecomunicacion
Universidad de Granada
18071 - GRANADA (Spain)