Rcall: Calling R from Matlab

Abstract

Summary: R and Matlab are two high-level scientific programming languages which are frequently applied in computational biology. To extend the wide variety of available and approved implementations, we present the Rcall interface which runs in MATLAB and provides direct access to methods and software packages implemented in R. Rcall involves passing the relevant data to R, executing the specified R commands and forwarding the results to MATLAB for further use. The evaluation and conversion of the basic data types in R and MATLAB are provided. Due to the easy embedding of R facilities, Rcall greatly extends the functionality of the MATLAB programming language. Availability: Source code is freely available at https://github.com/kreutz-lab/Rcall, implemented in MATLAB and supported on Linux, MS Windows and Mac OS X.