What is rPref?
rPref is a package for the statistical computing language R for Skyline computation and some slight generalizations of it ("database preferences").
The Skyline calculation in rPref is done very efficiently as all performance critical algorithms are written in C++.
Get started
rPref is available on CRAN, hence it can be downloaded and installed by:
install.packages("rPref")
# Load package
library(rPref)
News
2023-01-31: rPref v1.4.0 is on CRAN now. I did some C++ code cleanup such that rPref is compatible to the current CRAN guidelines.
2021-01-15: I wrote a new R package listcompr for list comprehension in R.
2019-02-16: rPref v1.3 is on CRAN now. Now the package is compatible to the newly released dplyr 0.8.0.1.
2017-03-05: In the R Journal, issue 12/2016 my article "Computing Pareto Frontiers and Database Preferences with the rPref Package" was published.
What is a Skyline?
The Skyline of a data set selects tuples which are Pareto-optimal with respect to given optimization goals. Only those tuples are returned which are not dominated by any other tuple. A tuple dominates another tuple if it is better in all relevant dimensions and strictly better in at least one dimension.
Hence, the computation of the Skyline is a powerful tool for prefiltering large data sets under given optimization goals. A typical example from economics is the search for products with low price and high quality. In this case one typically assumes that products which are worse in both dimensions (price and quality) are not interesting. Thus, a Pareto query optimizing for low price and high quality only returns the potentially interesting products. See examples or the linked papers to get a better understanding of Skylines and database preferences.