What Is Incanter? A Clojure-Based Statistical Computing Environment

Incanter is a Clojure-based, R-like platform for statistical computing and graphics. It can be used either as a standalone, interactive data analysis environment or embedded within other analytics systems as a modular suite of libraries. If you already work in Clojure or on the JVM and want R-style statistical programming without leaving that ecosystem, Incanter is built for exactly that use case.

What Incanter Provides

According to the project's own description, Incanter ships with these functional areas:

• Charting & visualization functions
• Mathematical functions
• Statistical functions
• Matrix & linear algebra functions
• Data manipulation functions
• Interactive, dynamic, functional statistical programming on the JVM

The design goal is to combine two things: the power of Clojure as a dynamically-typed, functional language, and the rich set of libraries already available on the JVM for accessing, processing, and visualizing data.

What It's Built On

Incanter is not a from-scratch numerics stack. At its core it leverages existing JVM libraries:

The project argues that Clojure's seamless Java integration makes leveraging these libraries simpler than is possible in R, while Incanter's R-like semantics and interactive shell make statistical programming simpler than in pure Java.

Why Clojure for Data Work

The project points to Clojure's fit for data processing through:

• Sequence-oriented data structures, extendable via the sequence abstraction
• Powerful sequence-processing functions
• Destructuring
• Data structure literals
• A growing list of third-party libraries

Design Lineage

Incanter's approach is not novel in kind. Its motivation traces to Back to the Future: Lisp as a Base for a Statistical Computing System by Ihaka and Lang (2008), and it draws inspiration from the now-dormant Lisp-Stat (see the 2005 Journal of Statistical Software special volume, "Lisp-Stat: Past, Present, and Future"). The motivation for a JVM-based Lisp comes from Clojure itself.

How to Get Started

The project lists several entry points:

1. Download a pre-built version of Incanter, or
2. Grab the latest source code from the GitHub repository, then
3. Visit the getting started page.

Incanter is also hosted on Clojars for those using Leiningen or Maven-based tools. It can be added as a dependency with a single line in a Leiningen project.clj file, or a few lines of XML in a Maven pom.xml file.

For examples of statistical programming with Incanter, the project directs readers to its documentation.

When Incanter Fits

Choose Incanter if you want R-like statistical and graphics workflows while staying inside Clojure and the JVM, or if you need a modular suite of statistical libraries to embed in a larger analytics system. If you don't use Clojure or the JVM, the integration advantages the project emphasizes won't apply to you.