NIMBLE Ecology Package
- Mentors
- Daniel Turek, Perry de Valpine
- Organization
- R project for statistical computing
The goal of this project is to build a new R package providing high-level user interfaces to many kinds of ecological models and implementing the analyses internally using NIMBLE. The project has two primary motivations. The first is to provide better tools for widely used ecological models. There are many individual R packages and other software that fit specific ecological models, but they lack flexibility in terms of the type of models and available Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. The second, perhaps equally important, is to showcase how NIMBLE can serve as a computational engine “under the hood” of an R package, and to develop extensions to NIMBLE that will support its use in this way. The proposed package, called nimbleEcology, will provide a unified framework that allows users to model a variety of ecological process with a simple specification of the model structure, and estimate them using efficient and customizable MCMC samplers.