Flocker: an R package for occupancy modeling with `brms`

This is as comprehensive a list as I could make now.

Sources

Selection criteria

  • Package provides an interface to brms::brm() to fit custom models (rather than provide other functionality for brms models, or using primarily other functions from brms, such as distributions)
  • not project specific (e.g. not a package for a specific paper or project; should allow for general use)

List

Comments

Some of these are more flexible than others. Some user very similar approaches, definiting new analogs to brmsformula, brmsfit, get_prior, make_stancode, etc. Some are thin wrappers around typical models but for specific usecases, others define custom families and “hack” brms to fit them.

I plan to make a more detailed comparison and analysis (and post it separately, not to dilute jsocolars thread), and see if anything useful (for example suggestions for brms to make the process easier) comes out of this. A lot of these packages are just coming out in the last year or are under development. Seems like a trendy idea and speaks to how amazingly useful and flexible brms is. Maybe we can think of a broader framework for doing this instead of everyone having to reinvent the process (I was completely unaware of all of these, but I’m just struck by how similar we do some things)

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