R Observatory: Metrics for DiSCos version 0.1.4

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

DiSCos needs evmix, which is past its CRAN deadline of Oct 12 to fix its check problems.

DiSCos

0.1.4Package record

Distributional Synthetic Controls Estimation

0packages depend

4.8Kdownloads / year

82.6%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by David Van DijckeCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗

The method of synthetic controls is a widely-adopted tool for evaluating causal effects of policy changes in settings with observational data. In many settings where it is applicable, researchers want to identify causal effects of policy changes on a treated unit at an aggregate level while having access to data at a finer granularity. This package implements a simple extension of the synthetic controls estimator, developed in Gunsilius (2023) doi:10.3982/ECTA18260, that takes advantage of this additional structure and provides nonparametric estimates of the heterogeneity within the aggregate unit. The idea is to replicate the quantile function associated with the treated unit by a weighted average of quantile functions of the control units. The package contains tools for aggregating and plotting the resulting distributional estimates, as well as for carrying out inference on them.

Changes in 0.1.4

Performance release: the bootstrap confidence intervals are about 3x faster and the permutation test and point estimation meaningfully faster, from sorting each sample once and evaluating quantiles/CDFs on the sorted data, and from vectorizing the confidence-interval assembly. Results are numerically identical to 0.1.3 for the same seed.

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("DiSCos", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("Davidvandijcke/DiSCos")

Development version from Davidvandijcke/DiSCos. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-discos

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled. We list this channel from recorded r2u download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-DiSCos

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-DiSCos

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed). We list this channel from recorded autoCRAN download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 4.6 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-10-17
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-10-14
OK13 OK2026-09-25
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-09-18
OK13 OK2026-08-05

Show 15 earlier changesHide 15 earlier changes

NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK13 OK2026-06-23
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-06-22
OK13 OK2026-06-01
ERROR11 OK, 2 ERROR2026-05-29
OK13 OK2026-05-06
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-05-04
OK14 OK2026-04-09
ERROR13 OK, 1 ERROR2026-04-02
OK14 OK2026-03-25
ERROR13 OK, 1 ERROR2026-03-22
OK14 OK2026-03-21
ERROR13 OK, 1 ERROR2026-03-20
OK14 OK2026-03-15
ERROR12 OK, 2 ERROR2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 0.1.4

READMEYes · 439 wordsVignettesYes · 1 · staticNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 0.1.4Citation fileNoWebsiteYes · pkgdown

Help pages: 28 (19 internal)
Examples that run: 0%2 only when donttest examples are enabled (R CMD check --as-cran)
Exported functions with examples: 33%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 100%
Help pages citing references: 14% with a bibliography file

Vignettes (1)

Empirical Application in Gunsilius (2023) HTML

How these are measured

Downloads

4.8K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #10,092 · ~13/day · ~396/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

39030 days

99090 days

4.8K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on119 r2u7 autocran

How downloads are counted

Repository

davidvandijcke/discos ↗Account: Davidvandijcke

5Stars

6Forks

2Open issues

2Open PRs

7Releases

117Commits

4Commit identities

117 commits · Last activity 2026-08-05 · 0% stars, 30d · Default branch at 0.1.5, ahead of CRAN 0.1.4 (checked 2026-10-18)

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 100%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: not measured
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 0

Stars over time

2025-07-03 · 32026-07-07 · 5

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

8 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 5 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/davidvandijcke/discos on 2026-10-18.

Continuous integration (1)

GitHub Actions

Docs source (4)

README.Rmdpkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2026-08-05 · The repository has a site deploy workflow

Reproducibility and dev environment (1)

data-raw/

CRAN release process (1)

cran-comments.md

Show all practicesHide 1 practice

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v3 (2026-09-26)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

14 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing DiSCos adds 60 packages (30 with compiled code, 50 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: ggplot2 6.0 MB, clarabel 5.7 MB, data.table 5.7 MB.

Depends (3)

R >= 2.10data.table ggplot2

Imports (8)

CVXR pracma RdpackparallelevmixutilsextremeStatMASS

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (7)

haven latex2exp knitr rmarkdown maps testthat (>= 3.0.0)quadprog

Enhances (0)

none

Dependencies facing archival

CRAN will archive these unless their check problems are fixed by the date shown. This package needs each one to install.

evmixdeadline passed Oct 12

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

0direct

0indirect

Nothing depends on this yet.

How these are counted

Code & Tests

Datasets

People & History

People (3)

David Van Dijcke

Author, Maintainer since 0.0.1 (2024)

Florian Gunsilius

Author

Siyun He

Author

Releases (6)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

0.1.4Latest
record
2026-07-12 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
0.1.3
record
2026-03-07 · diff ↗
unarchivedReturned to CRAN
2026-02-04
0.1.2
record
2026-02-04 · diff ↗
archivedRemoved from CRAN
2025-11-07
issues were not corrected despite reminders
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
0.1.1
record
2024-07-23 · diff ↗
0.1.0
record
2024-05-13 · diff ↗
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
0.0.1
record
2024-03-14
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21

Package metadata

First published: 2024-03-14
Total releases: 6 / 2 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 2.10
Bundled data: 1.4 MB / 1 file
Download size: 1.9 MB

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("DiSCos")

Format

Van Dijcke, D., Gunsilius, F., & He, S. (2026). DiSCos: Distributional Synthetic Controls Estimation (Version 0.1.4) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.DiSCos

This package has no citation file, so citation() returns this entry built from DESCRIPTION.

Cite the R Observatory

For a number measured here: a download total, a coverage figure, an archival date.

Format

APA

Balamuta, J. J. (2026). R Observatory: Metrics for DiSCos version 0.1.4 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-20. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-20, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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