Probaverse Blog

Release notes, package introductions, and ecosystem updates.

discretes package logo

Introducing discretes 0.1.0

I kept running into the same issue working with discrete probability distributions: representing a potentially infinite set of outcomes, and in a way that holds up under transformation.

On paper, this is straightforward. You write something like \[\{1, 2, 3, \ldots\}\] and move on.

probaverse package logo

Introducing probaverse 0.1.0

It wasn’t supposed to be a “-verse”. I just needed to be able to manipulate some probability distributions. But then three clearly different tasks needed special handling.

  • I needed to define the distribution object in the first place. Out came distionary.
  • Manipulation of these distributions could then be handled by distplyr.
  • The need to fit and tune distributions to data quickly followed, and so did famish.

And, to tie them all together, probaverse. If you’re familiar with how the tidyverse package loads the core tidyverse packages, probaverse is similar: it’s a meta-package whose purpose is simply to load… well, the probaverse packages.

distplyr package logo

Introducing distplyr 0.2.0

When I was modelling streamflow for the Coldwater River in British Columbia, I needed to combine distributions for rainfall-driven flow and snowmelt-driven flow. In that case, one useful operation was to take the distribution of whichever component was larger.
famish package logo

Introducing famish 0.2.0

In the release of distplyr, I wrote about needing to modify probability distributions to make them realistic for applications. Once distplyr made that possible along with distionary, I still needed to tune those distributions based on data.