Method and tool for generating hybrid time series forecasts using an error remodeling approach. These forecasting approaches utilize a recursive technique for modeling the linearity of the series using a linear method (e.g., ARIMA, Theta, etc.) and then models (forecasts) the residuals of the linear forecaster using non-linear neural networks (e.g., ANN, ARNN, etc.). The hybrid architectures comprise three steps: firstly, the linear patterns of the series are forecasted which are followed by an error re-modeling step, and finally, the forecasts from both the steps are combined to produce the final output. This method additionally provides the confidence intervals as needed. Ten different models can be implemented using this package. This package generates different types of hybrid error correction models for time series forecasting based on the algorithms by Zhang. (2003), Chakraborty et al. (2019), Chakraborty et al. (2020), Bhattacharyya et al. (2021), Chakraborty et al. (2022), and Bhattacharyya et al. (2022) <doi:10.1016/S0925-2312(01)00702-0> <doi:10.1016/j.physa.2019.121266> <doi:10.1016/j.chaos.2020.109850> <doi:10.1109/IJCNN52387.2021.9533747> <doi:10.1007/978-3-030-72834-2_29> <doi:10.1007/s11071-021-07099-3>.

The merits of TIMESAT and phenopix are adopted. Besides, a simple and growing season dividing method and a practical snow elimination method based on Whittaker were proposed. 7 curve fitting methods and 4 phenology extraction methods were provided. Parameters boundary are considered for every curve fitting methods according to their ecological meaning. And optimx is used to select best optimization method for different curve fitting methods. Reference: Kong, D., (2020). R package: A state-of-the-art Vegetation Phenology extraction package, phenofit version 0.3.1, <doi:10.5281/zenodo.5150204>; Kong, D., Zhang, Y., Wang, D., Chen, J., & Gu, X. (2020). Photoperiod Explains the Asynchronization Between Vegetation Carbon Phenology and Vegetation Greenness Phenology. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 125(8), e2020JG005636. <doi:10.1029/2020JG005636>; Kong, D., Zhang, Y., Gu, X., & Wang, D. (2019). A robust method for reconstructing global MODIS EVI time series on the Google Earth Engine. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 155, 13â 24; Zhang, Q., Kong, D., Shi, P., Singh, V.P., Sun, P., 2018. Vegetation phenology on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau and its response to climate change (1982â 2013). Agric. For. Meteorol. 248, 408â 417. <doi:10.1016/j.agrformet.2017.10.026>.

The name of the package is derived from the French, pour ridge, and provides functionality for ridge-type estimation of a potpourri of models. Currently, this estimation concerns that of various Gaussian graphical models from different study designs. Among others it considers the regular Gaussian graphical model and a mixture of such models. The porridge-package implements the estimation of the former either from i) data with replicated observations by penalized loglikelihood maximization using the regular ridge penalty on the parameters (van Wieringen, Chen, 2021) or ii) from non-replicated data by means of either a ridge estimator with multiple shrinkage targets (as presented in van Wieringen et al. 2020, <doi:10.1016/j.jmva.2020.104621>) or the generalized ridge estimator that allows for both the inclusion of quantitative and qualitative prior information on the precision matrix via element-wise penalization and shrinkage (van Wieringen, 2019, <doi:10.1080/10618600.2019.1604374>). Additionally, the porridge-package facilitates the ridge penalized estimation of a mixture of Gaussian graphical models (Aflakparast et al., 2018). On another note, the package also includes functionality for ridge-type estimation of the generalized linear model (as presented in van Wieringen, Binder, 2022, <doi:10.1080/10618600.2022.2035231>).

Fits right-truncated meta-analysis (RTMA), a bias correction for the joint effects of p-hacking (i.e., manipulation of results within studies to obtain significant, positive estimates) and traditional publication bias (i.e., the selective publication of studies with significant, positive results) in meta-analyses [see Mathur MB (2022). "Sensitivity analysis for p-hacking in meta-analyses." <doi:10.31219/osf.io/ezjsx>.]. Unlike publication bias alone, p-hacking that favors significant, positive results (termed "affirmative") can distort the distribution of affirmative results. To bias-correct results from affirmative studies would require strong assumptions on the exact nature of p-hacking. In contrast, joint p-hacking and publication bias do not distort the distribution of published nonaffirmative results when there is stringent p-hacking (e.g., investigators who hack always eventually obtain an affirmative result) or when there is stringent publication bias (e.g., nonaffirmative results from hacked studies are never published). This means that any published nonaffirmative results are from unhacked studies. Under these assumptions, RTMA involves analyzing only the published nonaffirmative results to essentially impute the full underlying distribution of all results prior to selection due to p-hacking and/or publication bias. The package also provides diagnostic plots described in Mathur (2022).

This package provides a collection of tools that allow users to perform critical steps in the process of assessing ecological niche evolution over phylogenies, with uncertainty incorporated explicitly in reconstructions. The method proposed here for ancestral reconstruction of ecological niches characterizes species niches using a bin-based approach that incorporates uncertainty in estimations. Compared to other existing methods, the approaches presented here reduce risk of overestimation of amounts and rates of ecological niche evolution. The main analyses include: initial exploration of environmental data in occurrence records and accessible areas, preparation of data for phylogenetic analyses, executing comparative phylogenetic analyses of ecological niches, and plotting for interpretations. Details on the theoretical background and methods used can be found in: Owens et al. (2020) <doi:10.1002/ece3.6359>, Peterson et al. (1999) <doi:10.1126/science.285.5431.1265>, Soberón and Peterson (2005) <doi:10.17161/bi.v2i0.4>, Peterson (2011) <doi:10.1111/j.1365-2699.2010.02456.x>, Barve et al. (2011) <doi:10.1111/ecog.02671>, Machado-Stredel et al. (2021) <doi:10.21425/F5FBG48814>, Owens et al. (2013) <doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2013.04.011>, Saupe et al. (2018) <doi:10.1093/sysbio/syx084>, and Cobos et al. (2021) <doi:10.1111/jav.02868>.

In order to facilitate the adjustment of the sample selection models existing in the literature, we created the ssmodels package. Our package allows the adjustment of the classic Heckman model (Heckman (1976), Heckman (1979) <doi:10.2307/1912352>), and the estimation of the parameters of this model via the maximum likelihood method and two-step method, in addition to the adjustment of the Heckman-t models introduced in the literature by Marchenko and Genton (2012) <doi:10.1080/01621459.2012.656011> and the Heckman-Skew model introduced in the literature by Ogundimu and Hutton (2016) <doi:10.1111/sjos.12171>. We also implemented functions to adjust the generalized version of the Heckman model, introduced by Bastos, Barreto-Souza, and Genton (2021) <doi:10.5705/ss.202021.0068>, that allows the inclusion of covariables to the dispersion and correlation parameters, and a function to adjust the Heckman-BS model introduced by Bastos and Barreto-Souza (2020) <doi:10.1080/02664763.2020.1780570> that uses the Birnbaum-Saunders distribution as a joint distribution of the selection and primary regression variables. This package extends and complements existing R packages such as sampleSelection (Toomet and Henningsen, 2008) and ssmrob (Zhelonkin et al., 2016), providing additional robust and flexible sample selection models.

Double constrained correspondence analysis (dc-CA) analyzes (multi-)trait (multi-)environment ecological data by using the vegan package and native R code. Throughout the two step algorithm of ter Braak et al. (2018) is used. This algorithm combines and extends community- (sample-) and species-level analyses, i.e. the usual community weighted means (CWM)-based regression analysis and the species-level analysis of species-niche centroids (SNC)-based regression analysis. The two steps use canonical correspondence analysis to regress the abundance data on to the traits and (weighted) redundancy analysis to regress the CWM of the orthonormalized traits on to the environmental predictors. The function dc_CA() has an option to divide the abundance data of a site by the site total, giving equal site weights. This division has the advantage that the multivariate analysis corresponds with an unweighted (multi-trait) community-level analysis, instead of being weighted. The first step of the algorithm uses vegan::cca(). The second step uses wrda() but vegan::rda() if the site weights are equal. This version has a predict() function. For details see ter Braak et al. 2018 <doi:10.1007/s10651-017-0395-x>. and ter Braak & van Rossum 2025 <doi:10.1016/j.ecoinf.2025.103143>.

Assessing predictive models of spatial data can be challenging, both because these models are typically built for extrapolating outside the original region represented by training data and due to potential spatially structured errors, with "hot spots" of higher than expected error clustered geographically due to spatial structure in the underlying data. Methods are provided for assessing models fit to spatial data, including approaches for measuring the spatial structure of model errors, assessing model predictions at multiple spatial scales, and evaluating where predictions can be made safely. Methods are particularly useful for models fit using the tidymodels framework. Methods include Moran's I ('Moran (1950) <doi:10.2307/2332142>), Geary's C ('Geary (1954) <doi:10.2307/2986645>), Getis-Ord's G ('Ord and Getis (1995) <doi:10.1111/j.1538-4632.1995.tb00912.x>), agreement coefficients from Ji and Gallo (2006) (<doi: 10.14358/PERS.72.7.823>), agreement metrics from Willmott (1981) (<doi: 10.1080/02723646.1981.10642213>) and Willmott et al'. (2012) (<doi: 10.1002/joc.2419>), an implementation of the area of applicability methodology from Meyer and Pebesma (2021) (<doi:10.1111/2041-210X.13650>), and an implementation of multi-scale assessment as described in Riemann et al'. (2010) (<doi:10.1016/j.rse.2010.05.010>).

Functionalities for facilitating systematic reviews, data extractions, and meta-analyses. It includes a GUI (graphical user interface) to help screen the abstracts and titles of bibliographic data; tools to assign screening effort across multiple collaborators/reviewers and to assess inter- reviewer reliability; tools to help automate the download and retrieval of journal PDF articles from online databases; figure and image extractions from PDFs; web scraping of citations; automated and manual data extraction from scatter-plot and bar-plot images; PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) flow diagrams; simple imputation tools to fill gaps in incomplete or missing study parameters; generation of random effects sizes for Hedges d, log response ratio, odds ratio, and correlation coefficients for Monte Carlo experiments; covariance equations for modelling dependencies among multiple effect sizes (e.g., effect sizes with a common control); and finally summaries that replicate analyses and outputs from widely used but no longer updated meta-analysis software (i.e., metawin). Funding for this package was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) grants DBI-1262545 and DEB-1451031. CITE: Lajeunesse, M.J. (2016) Facilitating systematic reviews, data extraction and meta-analysis with the metagear package for R. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 7, 323-330 <doi:10.1111/2041-210X.12472>.

The kallisto | bustools pipeline is a fast and modular set of tools to convert single cell RNA-seq reads in fastq files into gene count or transcript compatibility counts (TCC) matrices for downstream analysis. Central to this pipeline is the barcode, UMI, and set (BUS) file format. This package serves the following purposes: First, this package allows users to manipulate BUS format files as data frames in R and then convert them into gene count or TCC matrices. Furthermore, since R and Rcpp code is easier to handle than pure C++ code, users are encouraged to tweak the source code of this package to experiment with new uses of BUS format and different ways to convert the BUS file into gene count matrix. Second, this package can conveniently generate files required to generate gene count matrices for spliced and unspliced transcripts for RNA velocity. Here biotypes can be filtered and scaffolds and haplotypes can be removed, and the filtered transcriptome can be extracted and written to disk. Third, this package implements utility functions to get transcripts and associated genes required to convert BUS files to gene count matrices, to write the transcript to gene information in the format required by bustools, and to read output of bustools into R as sparses matrices.

Online, Semi-online, and Offline K-medians algorithms are given. For both methods, the algorithms can be initialized randomly or with the help of a robust hierarchical clustering. The number of clusters can be selected with the help of a penalized criterion. We provide functions to provide robust clustering. Function gen_K() enables to generate a sample of data following a contaminated Gaussian mixture. Functions Kmedians() and Kmeans() consists in a K-median and a K-means algorithms while Kplot() enables to produce graph for both methods. Cardot, H., Cenac, P. and Zitt, P-A. (2013). "Efficient and fast estimation of the geometric median in Hilbert spaces with an averaged stochastic gradient algorithm". Bernoulli, 19, 18-43. <doi:10.3150/11-BEJ390>. Cardot, H. and Godichon-Baggioni, A. (2017). "Fast Estimation of the Median Covariation Matrix with Application to Online Robust Principal Components Analysis". Test, 26(3), 461-480 <doi:10.1007/s11749-016-0519-x>. Godichon-Baggioni, A. and Surendran, S. "A penalized criterion for selecting the number of clusters for K-medians" <arXiv:2209.03597> Vardi, Y. and Zhang, C.-H. (2000). "The multivariate L1-median and associated data depth". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 97(4):1423-1426. <doi:10.1073/pnas.97.4.1423>.

Implement different Item Response Theory (IRT) based procedures for the development of static short test forms (STFs) from a test. Two main procedures are considered, specifically the typical IRT-based procedure for the development of STF, and a recently introduced procedure (Epifania, Anselmi & Robusto, 2022 <doi:10.1007/978-3-031-27781-8_7>). The procedures differ in how the most informative items are selected for the inclusion in the STF, either by considering their item information functions without considering any specific level of the latent trait (typical procedure) or by considering their informativeness with respect to specific levels of the latent trait, denoted as theta targets (the newly introduced procedure). Regarding the latter procedure, three methods are implemented for the definition of the theta targets: (i) theta targets are defined by segmenting the latent trait in equal intervals and considering the midpoint of each interval (equal interval procedure, eip), (ii) by clustering the latent trait to obtain unequal intervals and considering the centroids of the clusters as the theta targets (unequal intervals procedure, uip), and (iii) by letting the user set the specific theta targets of interest (user-defined procedure, udp). For further details on the procedure, please refer to Epifania, Anselmi & Robusto (2022) <doi:10.1007/978-3-031-27781-8_7>.

Local Individual Conditional Expectation ('localICE') is a local explanation approach from the field of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). localICE is a model-agnostic XAI approach which provides three-dimensional local explanations for particular data instances. The approach is proposed in the master thesis of Martin Walter as an extension to ICE (see Reference). The three dimensions are the two features at the horizontal and vertical axes as well as the target represented by different colors. The approach is applicable for classification and regression problems to explain interactions of two features towards the target. For classification models, the number of classes can be more than two and each class is added as a different color to the plot. The given instance is added to the plot as two dotted lines according to the feature values. The localICE-package can explain features of type factor and numeric of any machine learning model. Automatically supported machine learning packages are mlr', randomForest', caret or all other with an S3 predict function. For further model types from other libraries, a predict function has to be provided as an argument in order to get access to the model. Reference to the ICE approach: Alex Goldstein, Adam Kapelner, Justin Bleich, Emil Pitkin (2013) <arXiv:1309.6392>.

This package provides a gradient descent algorithm to find a geodesic relationship between real-valued independent variables and a manifold-valued dependent variable (i.e. geodesic regression). Available manifolds are Euclidean space, the sphere, hyperbolic space, and Kendall's 2-dimensional shape space. Besides the standard least-squares loss, the least absolute deviations, Huber, and Tukey biweight loss functions can also be used to perform robust geodesic regression. Functions to help choose appropriate cutoff parameters to maintain high efficiency for the Huber and Tukey biweight estimators are included, as are functions for generating random tangent vectors from the Riemannian normal distributions on the sphere and hyperbolic space. The n-sphere is a n-dimensional manifold: we represent it as a sphere of radius 1 and center 0 embedded in (n+1)-dimensional space. Using the hyperboloid model of hyperbolic space, n-dimensional hyperbolic space is embedded in (n+1)-dimensional Minkowski space as the upper sheet of a hyperboloid of two sheets. Kendall's 2D shape space with K landmarks is of real dimension 2K-4; preshapes are represented as complex K-vectors with mean 0 and magnitude 1. Details are described in Shin, H.-Y. and Oh, H.-S. (2020) <arXiv:2007.04518>. Also see Fletcher, P. T. (2013) <doi:10.1007/s11263-012-0591-y>.

In empirical studies, instrumental variable (IV) regression is the signature method to solve the endogeneity problem. If we enforce the exogeneity condition of the IV, it is likely that we end up with a large set of IVs without knowing which ones are good. Also, one could face the model uncertainty for structural equation, as large micro dataset is commonly available nowadays. This package uses adaptive group lasso and B-spline methods to select the nonparametric components of the IV function, with the linear function being a special case (naivereg). The package also incorporates two stage least squares estimator (2SLS), generalized method of moment (GMM), generalized empirical likelihood (GEL) methods post instrument selection, logistic-regression instrumental variables estimator (LIVE, for dummy endogenous variable problem), double-selection plus instrumental variable estimator (DS-IV) and double selection plus logistic regression instrumental variable estimator (DS-LIVE), where the double selection methods are useful for high-dimensional structural equation models. The naivereg is nonparametric version of ivregress in Stata with IV selection and high dimensional features. The package is based on the paper by Q. Fan and W. Zhong, "Nonparametric Additive Instrumental Variable Estimator: A Group Shrinkage Estimation Perspective" (2018), Journal of Business & Economic Statistics <doi:10.1080/07350015.2016.1180991> as well as a series of working papers led by the same authors.

While it has been well established that drugs affect and help patients differently, personalized drug response predictions remain challenging. Solutions based on single omics measurements have been proposed, and networks provide means to incorporate molecular interactions into reasoning. However, how to integrate the wealth of information contained in multiple omics layers still poses a complex problem. We present a novel network analysis pipeline, DrDimont, Drug response prediction from Differential analysis of multi-omics networks. It allows for comparative conclusions between two conditions and translates them into differential drug response predictions. DrDimont focuses on molecular interactions. It establishes condition-specific networks from correlation within an omics layer that are then reduced and combined into heterogeneous, multi-omics molecular networks. A novel semi-local, path-based integration step ensures integrative conclusions. Differential predictions are derived from comparing the condition-specific integrated networks. DrDimont's predictions are explainable, i.e., molecular differences that are the source of high differential drug scores can be retrieved. Our proposed pipeline leverages multi-omics data for differential predictions, e.g. on drug response, and includes prior information on interactions. The case study presented in the vignette uses data published by Krug (2020) <doi:10.1016/j.cell.2020.10.036>. The package license applies only to the software and explicitly not to the included data.

IsoBayes is a Bayesian method to perform inference on single protein isoforms. Our approach infers the presence/absence of protein isoforms, and also estimates their abundance; additionally, it provides a measure of the uncertainty of these estimates, via: i) the posterior probability that a protein isoform is present in the sample; ii) a posterior credible interval of its abundance. IsoBayes inputs liquid cromatography mass spectrometry (MS) data, and can work with both PSM counts, and intensities. When available, trascript isoform abundances (i.e., TPMs) are also incorporated: TPMs are used to formulate an informative prior for the respective protein isoform relative abundance. We further identify isoforms where the relative abundance of proteins and transcripts significantly differ. We use a two-layer latent variable approach to model two sources of uncertainty typical of MS data: i) peptides may be erroneously detected (even when absent); ii) many peptides are compatible with multiple protein isoforms. In the first layer, we sample the presence/absence of each peptide based on its estimated probability of being mistakenly detected, also known as PEP (i.e., posterior error probability). In the second layer, for peptides that were estimated as being present, we allocate their abundance across the protein isoforms they map to. These two steps allow us to recover the presence and abundance of each protein isoform.

This package provides a multi-purpose and flexible k-meric enrichment analysis software. kmeRtone measures the enrichment of k-mers by comparing the population of k-mers in the case loci with a carefully devised internal negative control group, consisting of k-mers from regions close to, yet sufficiently distant from, the case loci to mitigate any potential sequencing bias. This method effectively captures both the local sequencing variations and broader sequence influences, while also correcting for potential biases, thereby ensuring more accurate analysis. The core functionality of kmeRtone is the SCORE() function, which calculates the susceptibility scores for k-mers in case and control regions. Case regions are defined by the genomic coordinates provided in a file by the user and the control regions can be constructed relative to the case regions or provided directly. The k-meric susceptibility scores are calculated by using a one-proportion z-statistic. kmeRtone is highly flexible by allowing users to also specify their target k-mer patterns and quantify the corresponding k-mer enrichment scores in the context of these patterns, allowing for a more comprehensive approach to understanding the functional implications of specific DNA sequences on a genomic scale (e.g., CT motifs upon UV radiation damage). Adib A. Abdullah, Patrick Pflughaupt, Claudia Feng, Aleksandr B. Sahakyan (2024) Bioinformatics (submitted).

Statistical hypothesis testing methods for inferring model-free functional dependency using asymptotic chi-squared or exact distributions. Functional test statistics are asymmetric and functionally optimal, unique from other related statistics. Tests in this package reveal evidence for causality based on the causality-by- functionality principle. They include asymptotic functional chi-squared tests (Zhang & Song 2013) <doi:10.48550/arXiv.1311.2707>, an adapted functional chi-squared test (Kumar & Song 2022) <doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btac206>, and an exact functional test (Zhong & Song 2019) <doi:10.1109/TCBB.2018.2809743> (Nguyen et al. 2020) <doi:10.24963/ijcai.2020/372>. The normalized functional chi-squared test was used by Best Performer NMSUSongLab in HPN-DREAM (DREAM8) Breast Cancer Network Inference Challenges (Hill et al. 2016) <doi:10.1038/nmeth.3773>. A function index (Zhong & Song 2019) <doi:10.1186/s12920-019-0565-9> (Kumar et al. 2018) <doi:10.1109/BIBM.2018.8621502> derived from the functional test statistic offers a new effect size measure for the strength of functional dependency, a better alternative to conditional entropy in many aspects. For continuous data, these tests offer an advantage over regression analysis when a parametric functional form cannot be assumed; for categorical data, they provide a novel means to assess directional dependency not possible with symmetrical Pearson's chi-squared or Fisher's exact tests.

This package provides users with a simple and convenient mechanism to manage and query a Virtuoso database using the DBI (Data-Base Interface) compatible ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) interface. Virtuoso is a high-performance "universal server," which can act as both a relational database, supporting standard Structured Query Language ('SQL') queries, while also supporting data following the Resource Description Framework ('RDF') model for Linked Data. RDF data can be queried using SPARQL ('SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) queries, a graph-based query that supports semantic reasoning. This allows users to leverage the performance of local or remote Virtuoso servers using popular R packages such as DBI and dplyr', while also providing a high-performance solution for working with large RDF triplestores from R. The package also provides helper routines to install, launch, and manage a Virtuoso server locally on Mac', Windows and Linux platforms using the standard interactive installers from the R command-line. By automatically handling these setup steps, the package can make using Virtuoso considerably faster and easier for a most users to deploy in a local environment. Managing the bulk import of triples from common serializations with a single intuitive command is another key feature of this package. Bulk import performance can be tens to hundreds of times faster than the comparable imports using existing R tools, including rdflib and redland packages.

Tool to perform Bayesian inference of carcass processing/transport strategy and bone attrition from archaeofaunal skeletal profiles characterized by percentages of MAU (Minimum Anatomical Units). The approach is based on a generative model for skeletal profiles that replicates the two phases of formation of any faunal assemblage: initial accumulation as a function of human transport strategies and subsequent attrition.Two parameters define this model: 1) the transport preference (alpha), which can take any value between - 1 (mostly axial contribution) and 1 (mostly appendicular contribution) following strategies constructed as a function of butchering efficiency of different anatomical elements and the results of ethnographic studies, and 2) degree of attrition (beta), which can vary between 0 (no attrition) and 10 (maximum attrition) and relates the survivorship of bone elements to their maximum bone density. Starting from uniform prior probability distribution functions of alpha and beta, a Monte Carlo Markov Chain sampling based on a random walk Metropolis-Hasting algorithm is adopted to derive the posterior probability distribution functions, which are then available for interpretation. During this process, the likelihood of obtaining the observed percentages of MAU given a pair of parameter values is estimated by the inverse of the Chi2 statistic, multiplied by the proportion of elements within a 1 percent of the observed value. See Ana B. Marin-Arroyo, David Ocio (2018).<doi:10.1080/08912963.2017.1336620>.

This package implements a class of univariate and multivariate spatial generalised linear mixed models for areal unit data, with inference in a Bayesian setting using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation using a single or multiple Markov chains. The response variable can be binomial, Gaussian, multinomial, Poisson or zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP), and spatial autocorrelation is modelled by a set of random effects that are assigned a conditional autoregressive (CAR) prior distribution. A number of different models are available for univariate spatial data, including models with no random effects as well as random effects modelled by different types of CAR prior, including the BYM model (Besag et al., 1991, <doi:10.1007/BF00116466>) and Leroux model (Leroux et al., 2000, <doi:10.1007/978-1-4612-1284-3_4>). Additionally, a multivariate CAR (MCAR) model for multivariate spatial data is available, as is a two-level hierarchical model for modelling data relating to individuals within areas. Full details are given in the vignette accompanying this package. The initial creation of this package was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant RES-000-22-4256, and on-going development has been supported by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) grant EP/J017442/1, ESRC grant ES/K006460/1, Innovate UK / Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) grant NE/N007352/1 and the TB Alliance.

It can sometimes be difficult to ascertain when some events (such as property crime) occur because the victim is not present when the crime happens. As a result, police databases often record a start (or from') date and time, and an end (or to') date and time. The time span between these date/times can be minutes, hours, or sometimes days, hence the term Aoristic'. Aoristic is one of the past tenses in Greek and represents an uncertain occurrence in time. For events with a location describes with either a latitude/longitude, or X,Y coordinate pair, and a start and end date/time, this package generates an aoristic data frame with aoristic weighted probability values for each hour of the week, for each observation. The coordinates are not necessary for the program to calculate aoristic weights; however, they are part of this package because a spatial component has been integral to aoristic analysis from the start. Dummy coordinates can be introduced if the user only has temporal data. Outputs include an aoristic data frame, as well as summary graphs and displays. For more information see: Ratcliffe, JH (2002) Aoristic signatures and the temporal analysis of high volume crime patterns, Journal of Quantitative Criminology. 18 (1): 23-43. Note: This package replaces an original aoristic package (version 0.6) by George Kikuchi that has been discontinued with his permission.

The aim of this package is to offer new methodology for unit-level small area models under transformations and limited population auxiliary information. In addition to this new methodology, the widely used nested error regression model without transformations (see "An Error-Components Model for Prediction of County Crop Areas Using Survey and Satellite Data" by Battese, Harter and Fuller (1988) <doi:10.1080/01621459.1988.10478561>) and its well-known uncertainty estimate (see "The estimation of the mean squared error of small-area estimators" by Prasad and Rao (1990) <doi:10.1080/01621459.1995.10476570>) are provided. In this package, the log transformation and the data-driven log-shift transformation are provided. If a transformation is selected, an appropriate method is chosen depending on the respective input of the population data: Individual population data (see "Empirical best prediction under a nested error model with log transformation" by Molina and Martà n (2018) <doi:10.1214/17-aos1608>) but also aggregated population data (see "Estimating regional income indicators under transformations and access to limited population auxiliary information" by Würz, Schmid and Tzavidis <unpublished>) can be entered. Especially under limited data access, new methodologies are provided in saeTrafo. Several options are available to assess the used model and to judge, present and export its results. For a detailed description of the package and the methods used see the corresponding vignette.