These methods are described in the book Relative Distribution Methods in the Social Sciences, by Mark S. Handcock and Martina Morris, Springer-Verlag, Inc., New York, 1999 ISBN 0387987789 .

The software can be used freely for non-commercial purposes. You may modify and distribute the code for NON-commercial purposes, as long as this statement and the above contact information is included.

While this software has now been developed and used for several years by the authors and others, a new user may well experience some problems or bugs. Please report these by email (to either handcock@stat.ucla.edu or morrism@u.washington.edu), and we will work with you to resolve the problem.

The software:

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General relative distribution software

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• There is an package called reldist which should be installed from within R. It is software to estimate and graph the relative density, CDF and related functions. Also functions to estimate summary measures and their uncertainties. This contains functions directly related to the relative distribution and some data used in the book.
• reldistaux: Auxillary programs required to reconstruct the figures and numbers in the book. These programs estimate and graph densities, and related summary measures. This requires that the reldist package have been installed.

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  Documentation and Installation

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• Primary documentation for the software installation and use (in PDF form)

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  The package is on the CRAN website. To install the reldist package, simply open R and type

  install.packages("reldist")

  at the prompt. Once the package has been downloaded and installed, it can be used by typing the call

  library(reldist)

  In the future, you can automatically update the reldist package by typing

  update.packages()

  This will only update it when a new version is available.

  Version 1.5 was made available on May 1, 2004.

  If you wish to reconstruct the figures in the book, remember to download the data files. Remember to unzip the data files (if it is not done automatically by your browser).

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  Software to create the figures and tables in the book. Remember to unzip the archive for each chapter (if it is not done automatically by your browser). Figure X.Y is created by file "FigRDBX.Y".
  To use the files:
  
  Install the R package reldist.
  
  Click on the files to save it into the UNIX or PC sub-directory in which you use R.
  
  Start R, and source the files e.g.: % R
  
  > source("FigRDB2.1")
  

  Figures from Chapter 2

  Figures from Chapter 3

  Figures from Chapter 4

  Figures from Chapter 6

  Figures from Chapter 8

  Figures from Chapter 9

  Figures from Chapter 11

  Figures from Chapter 12

  Figures from Chapter 13

Software to create the figures and tables in the primary documentation is FigSMwp27.r.

Description of data sources, and further information about the data sets, can be found in the book.