Nordpred software package
Software for predicting trends in cancer incidence (using the R or S-PLUS statistical packages)
Index of this page
• License
• Download the Nordpred package
About the package
The Nordpred software package is a package of R(about R) and S-PLUS functions for predicting trends in cancer incidence, using a special version of the Age-Period-Cohort model (APC). The package is written by Harald Fekjær and Bjørn Møller at the Cancer Registry of Norway as part of a larger cancer prediction project with financial support from the Nordic Cancer Union (NCU).
Background for the methods can be found in:
Møller B., Fekjær H., Hakulinen T., Sigvaldason H, Storm H. H., Talbäck M. and Haldorsen T. "Prediction of cancer incidence in the Nordic countries: Empirical comparison of different approaches” (2003) Statistics in medicine, 22:2751-2766
And an example of used in:
Møller B, Fekjær H, Hakulinen T, Tryggvadóttir L, Storm HH, Talbäck M, Haldorsen T. Prediction of cancer incidence in the Nordic countries up to the year 2020.” (2002) European Journal of Cancer Prevention, Volume 11, Supplement 1
License
Nordpred is copyright by the Cancer Registry of Norway, and comes under “GNU General Public License V2” license. This basically means that the package is free and open source, and that all updates or changes in the code should be make public available without charge. In addition, there is no warranty what so ever. For more information about the license, see the file “license.txt” in the package.
Registration
To help us measure the interest for the package and to receive an e-mail list for upgrades, please send an e-mail to harald.weedon-fekjar@medisin.uio.no stating your e-mail address, company and country as well as information about your operating system, whether you use it with S-PLUS or R and whether you want information about upgrades. We are also interested in learning where you heard about the Nordpred software. We will of course never use the information you send us to send you spam or give away your contact information.
Download the Nordpred package
• nordpred.S (source code -use the "source" command to read the files into S-PLUS or R)
• nordpred-docpages.pdf (documentation)
• nordpred-example.txt (example of use)
• Nordpred-data-eks.zip (data files used by the example)
• licence.txt (the GNU general public license covering the Nordpred package)
About R and S-PLUS
R and S-PLUS are implementations of the S language for statistical computing. The language was originally developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues, and is a state of the art environment for statistical computing. Both packages include advanced graphics and a very rich set of statistical routines.
S-PLUS is a commercial product sold by Insightful, while R is freely available and can be downloaded from http://cran.r-project.org/ (There are binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux).
Remark for S-PLUS users
The power link is made through a special modification in S-PLUS. This works fine for the point estimates, but the variance estimates found via the glm-objects are wrong. For variance estimates, we would rather recommend using R.
Acknowledgments
We want to thank:
• Timo Hakulinen (Finland), Helgi Sigvaldason (Iceland), Hans H. Storm (Denmark), Mats Talbäck (Sweden) and Tor Haldorsen (Norway) for joint work on the Nordpred-project.
• The Nordic Cancer Union (NCU) for financial support
• The R core group for making an excellent statistical system free of charge.