Hi Jacquomo,

 

The error message comes from R, and generally means that the package that you are trying to use was built for a different version of R than is installed.

 

When dealing with R packages, there are two version numbers that you have to keep track of. One is the version number of the package itself—1.03 in the case of Trevor Hastie’s gam package. This version number is used to track changes in that package. For example, when Trevor releases a new version of the gam package that fixes some bugs, he might give it the number 1.04. The second version number is the version of R for which the package has been compiled. For example, you might have gam version 1.03 that has been compiled for R 2.8.0. In fact, the gam package has not been changed much in quite some time, so version 1.03 has probably been compiled for many versions of R: 2.7.0, 2.7.1, 2.7.2, 2.8.0, etc.

 

To get to the bottom of this, we need to know which version of R you have and which version the gam package has been compiled for. To determine the R version, start the R console and type “version” without quotes and press enter. Look for an output called “version.string”.

 

To determine which version of R the gam package has been compiled for, type “installed.packages()” without quotes and press enter. A table will be printed. The first column will be the package name. The Version column gives the version of the package itself, which is probably “1.03”. The Depends column lists what must be installed for the package to work. Finally, the Built column lists what version of R was used to compile the package.

 

What R version do you have, and what does the Depends and Built columns say for the gam package?

 

Regarding your firewall: is it a proxy that requires a username and password to do the download? If so, we may be able to instruct R to give this password when it performs the download when invoked by the MGET Fit GAM tool.

 

Finally, if you cannot get the gam package working, do you have any objection to using the mgcv package instead? It is built into most recent versions of R, so you will not have to install anything to use it.

 

Best regards,

 

Jason

 

 

Hi Guys,

 

Just trying to fit a GAM using MGET. I have the Trevor Hastie’s gam (v 1.03) package loaded in the R library but an error appears saying that ‘gam’ is not a valid package – installed < 2.0.0?. I have searched the cran website for a gam version 2.0.0 but I cannot find one. Is this what the error msg is referring to?

Also, I know that MGET automatically searches cran for the desired r package, but our firewall here does not allow it to successfully do this.

Any advice on this issue would be appreciated.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Jac

 

Mr Jacquomo Monk (Hons)

PhD Candidate

 

School of Life and Environmental Sciences

Deakin University

PO Box 423, Warrnambool,

Victoria, 3280, Australia

 

Email.

Mob. 04 0953 8262