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John M Chambers Statistical Software Award Won by Warwick Statisticians

The 2007 John M Chambers Statistical Software Award of the American Statistical Association is to be made to Dr Heather Turner and Professor David Firth, for their gnm package. The Chambers Award aims to encourage innovative and well-designed statistical software, and is awarded annually to one project worldwide.

The open-source gnm package is published as an add-on to R, through the Comprehensive R Archive Network. It provides extensive facilities for specifying, fitting and interpreting a large class of statistical models, the generalized nonlinear models, its generality being achieved through the innovative, unified use of over-parameterized representations of models. Applications of the software are in many different research fields, including the social sciences, health sciences, agriculture, etc. A detailed manual, Generalized Nonlinear Models in R: An Overview of the gnm Package (pdf) gives many worked examples from different fields.

The initial development of gnm was funded by ESRC through a Professorial Fellowship, and the first public release was in 2005. Ongoing work is also funded by ESRC, as part of the Lancaster-Warwick node of the National Centre for Research Methods.

Heather will travel to Salt Lake City in August to receive the award at this year's Joint Statistical Meetings.