DEPRECATED. Do not start building new projects based on this package. Cross-platform alternatives are the following packages: bigmemory (CRAN), ff (CRAN), BufferedMatrix (Bioconductor).  The main usage of it was inside the aroma.affymetrix package. (The package currently provides a class representing a matrix where the actual data is stored in a binary format on the local file system.  This way the size limit of the data is set by the file system and not the memory.)

Performs the Joint and Individual Variation Explained (JIVE) decomposition on a list of data sets when the data share a dimension, returning low-rank matrices that capture the joint and individual structure of the data [O'Connell, MJ and Lock, EF (2016) <doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btw324>]. It provides two methods of rank selection when the rank is unknown, a permutation test and a Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) selection algorithm. Also included in the package are three plotting functions for visualizing the variance attributed to each data source: a bar plot that shows the percentages of the variability attributable to joint and individual structure, a heatmap that shows the structure of the variability, and principal component plots.

Methods readMat() and writeMat() for reading and writing MAT files.  For user with MATLAB v6 or newer installed (either locally or on a remote host), the package also provides methods for controlling MATLAB (trademark) via R and sending and retrieving data between R and MATLAB.

Methods that simplify the setup of S3 generic functions and S3 methods.  Major effort has been made in making definition of methods as simple as possible with a minimum of maintenance for package developers.  For example, generic functions are created automatically, if missing, and naming conflict are automatically solved, if possible.  The method setMethodS3() is a good start for those who in the future may want to migrate to S4.  This is a cross-platform package implemented in pure R that generates standard S3 methods.