README.md

In davidearn/fastbeta: Fast Approximation of Time-Varying Infectious Disease Transmission Rates

fastbeta

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).

Installation

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 --install

in 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.

Documentation

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".

Repository structure

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")

References

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]

davidearn/fastbeta documentation built on July 4, 2025, 6:28 p.m.