Cross-Entropy R Package for Optimization (CEoptim)
Optimization solver based on the Cross-Entropy method.

Distributed Computations (distcomp)
Distcomp, a new R package available on GitHub from a group of Stanford researchers has the potential to significantly advance the practice of collaborative computing with large data sets distributed over separate sites that may be unwilling to explicitly share data. The fundamental idea is to be able to rapidly set up a web service based on Shiny and opencpu technology that manages and performs a series of master / slave computations which require sharing only intermediate results. The particular target application for distcomp is any group of medical researchers who would like to fit a statistical model using the data from several data sets, but face daunting difficulties with data aggregation or are constrained by privacy concerns. Distcomp and its methodology, however, ought to be of interest to any organization with data spread across multiple heterogeneous database environments.

The Forward Imputation: A Sequential Distance-Based Approach for Imputing Missing Data (GenForImp)
Two methods based on the Forward Imputation approach are implemented for the imputation of quantitative missing data. One method alternates Nearest Neighbour Imputation and Principal Component Analysis (function ‘ForImp.PCA’), the other uses Nearest Neig