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VA Technical Reference Model v 25.7

R for Statistical Computing

General Information

Technologies must be operated and maintained in accordance with Federal and Department security and privacy policies and guidelines. More information on the proper use of the TRM can be found on the TRM Proper Use Tab/Section.

Website:	Go to site
Description:	R is an open source software environment used for statistical computing, data manipulation, calculation, and graphical display. Statistical features include linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, and clustering.
Technology/Standard Usage Requirements:	Users must ensure their use of this technology/standard is consistent with VA policies and standards, including, but not limited to, VA Handbooks 6102 and 6500; VA Directives 6004, 6513, and 6517; and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards, including Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS). Users must ensure sensitive data is properly protected in compliance with all VA regulations. Prior to use of this technology, users should check with their supervisor, Information System Security Officer (ISSO), Facility Chief Information Officer (CIO), or local Office of Information and Technology (OI&T) representative to ensure that all actions are consistent with current VA policies and procedures prior to implementation.
Section 508 Information:	This technology has been assessed by the Section 508 Office and found non-conformant. The Implementer of this technology has the responsibility to ensure the version deployed is 508-compliant. Section 508 compliance may be reviewed by the Section 508 Office and appropriate remedial action required if necessary. For additional information or assistance regarding Section 508, please contact the Section 508 Office at Section508@va.gov. Please see reference tab for more information concerning product versions.
Decision:	View Decisions

Decision Source:	TRM Mgmt Group
Decision Process:	One-VA TRM v25.4
Decision Date:	04/03/2025 at 01:53:57 UTC
Aliases:	R for Windows, R for SPSS Stats
Introduced By:	SCCM
Vendor Name:	R Foundation for Statistical Computing

Vendor Release Information

The Vendor Release table provides the known releases for the TRM Technology, obtained from the vendor (or from the release source).

You must be logged into the RSAA website prior to clicking the Attestation URLs or the URLs won't open.

Major versions and minor versions of that Major released on or after 09/14/2022 are NOT EXEMPT. Major Versions released before 09/14/2022 are EXEMPT as well as minor versions of that Major regardless of release date.

Version	Release Date	Vendor End of Life Date	Vendor Desupport Date
2.x	10/04/2004
3.x	04/03/2013
4.x	04/24/2020

Current Decision Matrix (03/28/2025)

Users must ensure their use of this technology/standard is consistent with VA policies and standards, including, but not limited to, VA Handbooks 6102 and 6500; VA Directives 6004, 6513, and 6517; and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards, including Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS). Users must ensure sensitive data is properly protected in compliance with all VA regulations. Prior to use of this technology, users should check with their supervisor, Information System Security Officer (ISSO), Facility Chief Information Officer (CIO), or local Office of Information and Technology (OI&T) representative to ensure that all actions are consistent with current VA policies and procedures prior to implementation.

The VA Decision Matrix displays the current and future VAIT position regarding different releases of a TRM entry. These decisions are based upon the best information available as of the most current date. The consumer of this information has the responsibility to consult the organizations responsible for the desktop, testing, and/or production environments to ensure that the target version of the technology will be supported.

Legend:

White	Authorized: The technology/standard has been authorized for use.
Yellow	Authorized w/ Constraints: The technology/standard can be used within the specified constraints located below the decision matrix in the footnote[1] and on the General tab.
Gray	Authorized w/ Constraints (POA&M): This technology or standard can be used only if a POA&M review is conducted and signed by the Authorizing Official Designated Representative (AODR) as designated by the Authorizing Official (AO) or designee and based upon a recommendation from the POA&M Compliance Enforcement, has been granted to the project team or organization that wishes to use the technology.
Orange	Authorized w/ Constraints (DIVEST): VA has decided to divest itself on the use of the technology/standard. As a result, all projects currently utilizing the technology/standard must plan to eliminate their use of the technology/standard. Additional information on when the entry is projected to become unauthorized may be found on the Decision tab for the specific entry.
Black	Unauthorized: The technology/standard is not (currently) permitted to be used under any circumstances.
Blue	Authorized w/ Constraints (PLANNING/EVALUATION): The period of time this technology is currently being evaluated, reviewed, and tested in controlled environments. Use of this technology is strictly controlled and not available for use within the general population. If a customer would like to use this technology, please work with your local or Regional OI&T office and contact the appropriate evaluation office displayed in the notes below the decision matrix. The Local or Regional OI&T office should submit an inquiry to the TRM if they require further assistance or if the evaluating office is not listed in the notes below.

Release/Version Information:

VA decisions for specific versions may include a ‘.x’ wildcard, which denotes a decision that pertains to a range of multiple versions.

For example, a technology authorized with a decision for 7.x would cover any version of 7.(Anything) - 7.(Anything). However, a 7.4.x decision would cover any version of 7.4.(Anything), but would not cover any version of 7.5.x or 7.6.x on the TRM.

VA decisions for specific versions may include ‘+’ symbols; which denotes that the decision for the version specified also includes versions greater than what is specified but is not to exceed or affect previous decimal places.

For example, a technology authorized with a decision for 12.6.4+ would cover any version that is greater than 12.6.4, but would not exceed the .6 decimal ie: 12.6.401 is ok, 12.6.5 is ok, 12.6.9 is ok, however 12.7.0 or 13.0 is not.

Any major.minor version that is not listed in the VA Decision Matrix is considered Authorized w/ Constraints (POA&M).

<Past

CY2024

CY2025

CY2026

Future>

Release

2.x

Unapproved

Authorized w/ Constraints (POA&M)

3.x

Unapproved

Authorized w/ Constraints (POA&M)

4.x

Approved w/Constraints
[4, 8, 9, 10]

Approved w/Constraints
[8, 9, 10, 11]

Authorized w/ Constraints
[8, 9, 10, 11]

Note:

At the time of writing, version 4.4.3 is the most current version, released 02/28/2025.

Decision Constraints


[4]	Technology must remain patched and operated in accordance with Federal and Department security policies and guidelines in order to mitigate known and future security vulnerabilities.

[8]	Users should check with their supervisor, Information System Security Officer (ISSO) or local OIT representative for permission to download and use this software. Downloaded software must always be scanned for viruses prior to installation to prevent adware or malware. Freeware may only be downloaded directly from the primary site that the creator of the software has advertised for public download and user or development community engagement. Users should note, any attempt by the installation process to install any additional, unrelated software is not authorized and the user should take the proper steps to decline those installations.

[9]	Veterans Affairs (VA) users must ensure VA sensitive data is properly protected in compliance with all VA regulations. All instances of deployment using this technology should be reviewed by the local ISSO (Information System Security Officer) to ensure compliance with both VA Handbook 6500 and VA Directive 6500.

[10]	The Federal Information Processing standards (FIPS) 140-2 certification status of this technology was not able to be verified. This technology will require a 3rd party FIPS 140-2 or 140-3 certified solution for any data containing PHI/PII or VA sensitive information, where applicable. More information regarding the Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) can be found on the NIST website.

[11]	Due to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) identified security vulnerabilities, extra vigilance should be applied to ensure the versions remain properly patched to mitigate known and future vulnerabilities. The local ISSO (Information System Security Officer) can provide assistance in reviewing the NIST vulnerabilities.

Technology Components

Note: This list may not be complete. No component, listed or unlisted, may be used outside of the technology in which it is released. The usage decision for a component is found in the Decision and Decision Constraints.

Name	Description
DescTools	DescTools, is an add-on package to R, contains built-in functions for several statistical tests.
dplyr: A Grammar of Data Manipulation	This is a link to the dplyr package for R that includes a description, documentation, links and code for Windows and macOS.
mclust: Gaussian Mixture Modelling for Model-Based Clustering, Classification, and Density Estimation	This is a link to the mclust package for R that includes a description, documentation, links and code for Windows and macOS.
psych: Procedures for Psychological, Psychometric, and Personality Research	This is a link to the psych package for R that includes a description, documentation, links and code for Windows and macOS.
Quanteda: Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data	Quanteda is a fast, flexible, and comprehensive framework for quantitative text analysis in R. Provides functionality for corpus management, creating and manipulating tokens and n-grams, exploring keywords in context, forming and manipulating sparse matrices of documents by features and feature co-occurrences, analyzing keywords, computing feature similarities and distances, applying content dictionaries, applying supervised and unsupervised machine learning, visually representing text and text analyses, and more.
Random Forest	This is a link that explains Random Forest as an ensemble learning utility that leverages the power of multiple alternative analyses and randomization strategies to produce accurate models, variable importance ranking, and reporting on a record-by-record basis. This utility allows users to spot outliers and anomalies in data, display proximity clusters, predict future outcomes, identify important predictors, discover data patterns and replace missing values with imputations.
Structural Topic Model	The Structural Topic Model (STM) allows researchers to estimate topic models with document-level covariates. The package also includes tools for model selection, visualization, and estimation of topic-covariate regressions.
TidyLPA: Easily Carry Out Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) Using Open-Source or Commercial Software	This is a link to the TidyLPA package for R that includes a description, documentation, links and code for Windows and macOS.
Tidymodels package	The tidy modeling `verse` is a collection of packages for modeling and statistical analysis that share the underlying design philosophy, grammar, and data structures of the tidyverse.
tidytext	This is a link to the tidytext package for R that includes a description,documentation, links and code for Windows and macOS.
xxM Package	xxM is an R package for Structural Equations Modeling with complex dependent data structures which implements its own modeling framework.


Information Management Technologies Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse Platforms	Data Analytics (Statistical Analysis, Prediction, and Modeling)

General Analysis

Adoption Benefits

This technology is available at no cost through open-source licensing and supports VA`s open source initiative.
This technology may improve productivity for specific staff whose responsibilities include research involving statistical analysis.
This is a well-documented technology.

Adoption Risks

There is no indication based on either the vendor documentation or the Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) that this technology is Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 compliant.
There are known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) associated with this technology. Please see https://nvd.NIST.gov/vuln/search for more details.
As open-source software, this product may be left without clearly defined support options which may result in suboptimal enterprise level support.
The potential exists to store Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI) and/or VA Sensitive data and proper security standards must be followed in these cases.
Due to the rapid release schedule of this technology, the VA may be unable to update to the most recent patch and may require a deployment model requiring the use of specific versions.
There are other authorized solutions that provide similar functionality available on the TRM. The use of several similar solutions may increase organization requirements for support and maintenance.

Architectural Benefits

This technology is portable as it runs on multiple TRM-authorized operating systems.

- The information contained on this page is accurate as of the Decision Date (04/03/2025 at 01:53:57 UTC).

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VA Technical Reference Model v 25.7

General Information

Vendor Release Information

Current Decision Matrix (03/28/2025)

Decision Constraints

References

Technology Components

VA Categories

View the VA Categorization Framework

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Operating Systems Supported by the Technology

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VA Technical Reference Model v 25.7

General Information

Vendor Release Information

Current Decision Matrix (03/28/2025)

Decision Constraints

References

Technology Components

VA Categories View the VA Categorization Framework

Open Source

Operating Systems Supported by the Technology

Technologies/Standards Relationships

Runtime Dependencies:

Optional Dependencies:

Comparable Technologies:

Companion Technologies/Supported Standards:

General Analysis

Adoption Benefits

Adoption Risks

Architectural Benefits

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VA Categories

View the VA Categorization Framework