MatrixGenerics is an R/Bioconductor package that provides the S4 generics for popular row and column aggregation functions for matrices (e.g. colVars(), rowMedians()). It follows the API developed by the matrixStats package. The target audience for MatrixGenerics are R package developers that want to write code that can automatically handle different kind of matrix implementations: for example base R matrix, the S4 Matrix (including sparse representations), and DelayedMatrix objects.

A prerequisite to handle these matrix objects is that a package with the corresponding implementation is available. So far, there are six packages:

• matrixStats for base R matrix objects
• Matrix and sparseMatrixStats for dgCMatrix (sparse matrix) objects from the Matrix package
• SparseArray for SVT_SparseMatrix objects from the same package
• DelayedArray and DelayedMatrixStats for DelayedMatrix objects from the DelayedArray package.

This package imports matrixStats and automatically forwards all function calls on matrix, array, or numeric objects to matrixStats. To handle other matrix-like objects, the user must manually install the package that implements row and column aggregation methods for those objects (e.g. the sparseMatrixStats, SparseArray, DelayedArray, or DelayedMatrixStats package).

See https://bioconductor.org/packages/MatrixGenerics for more information including how to install the release version of the package (please refrain from installing directly from GitHub).