Acknowledgments

A number of people worked hard to make this a better book. They include

• Marjan Bace, Manning publisher, who asked me to write this book in the first place.
• Sebastian Stirling, development editor, who spent many hours on the phone with me, helping me organize the material, clarify concepts, and generally make the text more interesting. He also helped me through the many steps to publication.
• Karen Tegtmeyer, review editor, who helped obtain reviewers and coordinate the review process.
• Mary Piergies, who helped shepherd this book through the production process, and her team of Liz Welch, Susan Harkins, and Rachel Schroeder.
• Pablo Domínguez Vaselli, technical proofreader, who helped uncover areas of confusion and provided an independent and expert eye for testing code.
• The peer reviewers who spent hours of their own time carefully reading through the material, finding typos and making valuable substantive suggestions: Chris Williams, Charles Malpas, Angela Staples, PhD, Daniel Reis Pereira, Dr. D. H. van Rijn, Dr. Christian Marquardt, Amos Folarin, Stuart Jefferys, Dror Berel, Patrick Breen, Elizabeth Ostrowski, PhD, Atef Ouni, Carles Fenollosa, Ricardo Pietrobon, Samuel McQuillin, Landon Cox, Austin Ziegler, Rick Wagner, Ryan Cox, Sumit Pal, Philipp K. Janert, Deepak Vohra, and Sophie Mormede.
• The many Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) participants who bought the book before it was finished, asked great questions, pointed out errors, and made helpful suggestions.

Each contributor has made this a better and more comprehensive book.

I would also like to acknowledge the many software authors that have contributed to making R such a powerful data-analytic platform. They include not only the core developers, but also the selfless individuals who have created and maintain contributed packages, extending R’s capabilities greatly. Appendix F provides a list of the authors of contributed packages described in this book. In particular, I would like to mention John Fox, Hadley Wickham, Frank E. Harrell, Jr., Deepayan Sarkar, and William Revelle, whose works I greatly admire. I have tried to represent their contributions accurately, and I remain solely responsible for any errors or distortions inadvertently included in this book.

I really should have started this book by thanking my wife and partner, Carol Lynn. Although she has no intrinsic interest in statistics or programming, she read each chapter multiple times and made countless corrections and suggestions. No greater love has any person than to read multivariate statistics for another. Just as important, she suffered the long nights and weekends that I spent writing this book, with grace, support, and affection. There is no logical explanation why I should be this lucky.

There are two other people I would like to thank. One is my father, whose love of science was inspiring and who gave me an appreciation of the value of data. The other is Gary K. Burger, my mentor in graduate school. Gary got me interested in a career in statistics and teaching when I thought I wanted to be a clinician. This is all his fault.