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Making the Model Compatible with Zelig

You can develop a model, write the model-fitting function, and test it within the Zelig framework without explicit intervention from the Zelig team. (We are, of course, happy to respond to any questions or suggestions for improvement.)

Zelig's modularity relies on two R programming conventions:

1. wrappers, which pass arguments from R functions to other R functions or to foreign function calls (such as C, C++, or Fortran functions); and
2. classes, which tell generic functions how to handle objects of a given class.

Specific methods for R generic functions take the general form: method.class(), where method is the name of the generic procedure to be performed and class is the class of the object. You may define, for example, summary.contrib() to summarize the output of your model. Note that for S4 classes, the name of generic functions does not have to be method.class() so long as users can call them via method().