fastbeta is an R package for approximating time-varying infectious disease transmission rates from disease incidence time series and other data. The algorithm is fast, being based on a discrete time approximation of an SEIR model with user-defined numbers of latent and infectious compartments. Auxiliary functions support parametric bootstrapping (for approximating confidence intervals on transmission rates), efficient time series simulation (for general purpose simulation studies), and Richardson-Lucy deconvolution (for estimating incidence from observed incidence conditional on a flexible observation model).
CRAN distributes both the package sources and binaries for Windows and macOS. Hence typical users will install fastbeta with
install.packages("fastbeta")or perhaps
install.packages("fastbeta", type = "source")to force installation from sources where installation of a binary
would occur by default. The rest of this section concerns the
type = "source" case.
Installation from sources depends on compilers and related tools. These will already be available on modern Linux installations. Windows users must have installed Rtools. macOS users must have installed Apple's Command Line Tools for Xcode and GNU Fortran. The most recent version of Command Line Tools supporting the version of macOS in use can be installed by running
sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
sudo xcode-select --installin Terminal. Binaries for older versions of Command Line Tools can be downloaded here. GNU Fortran should be installed following the instructions on the R for macOS Developers page.
Vignette building depends on a
LaTeX distribution.
Specifically, PATH must specify the location of pdflatex.
Issues related to installation should be reported (with relevant output) here. Notably, details for Windows and macOS can differ for non-current versions of R or non-standard installations of R, where the "standard" way to install R is to download and unpack a binary built and published by CRAN.
Compiler errors encountered on macOS are almost always explained
by unmet dependencies or masking of native tools, headers, and
libraries with non-native ones (e.g., ones installed by Homebrew).
Masking occurs due to dubious configuration of PATH or dubious
setting (typically in ~/.R/Makevars) of Make variables such as
CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS. Users should reattempt compilation
after removing suspicious components of PATH (e.g., by
removing relevant lines of startup files in your home directory,
then launching a new shell) and (re)moving ~/.R/Makevars.
After installing, users can access the package index (a list of available help topics) with:
help(package = "fastbeta")The HTML help contains useful hyperlinks and typeset math.
You can force HTML rendering, where that is not the default,
by passing help_type = "html".
Active development happens on branch master. Tested changes intended
for the next release are ported to branch release-candidate,
where tarballs submitted to CRAN are eventually built. Neither master
nor release-candidate should be considered stable.
The stable branches are named release-x.y.z. They branch from
release-candidate before the version number there is incremented,
typically just after a tarball is submitted to CRAN.
To install fastbeta from sources in a given branch or commit, install remotes and run, e.g.,
remotes::install_github("davidearn/fastbeta", ref = "release-0.3.0")
remotes::install_github("davidearn/fastbeta", ref = "04c8f7b")Jagan, M., deJonge, M. S., Krylova, O., & Earn, D. J. D. (2020). Fast estimation of time-varying infectious disease transmission rates. PLOS Computational Biology, 16(9), Article e1008124, 1-39. [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008124]