R Observatory: Metrics for Dire version 2.2.0

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

Dire

2.2.0Package record

Linear Regressions with a Latent Outcome Variable

1packages depend

6.9Kdownloads / year

51.1%test coverage

8/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Paul BaileyCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗

Fit latent variable linear models, estimating score distributions for groups of people, following Cohen and Jiang (1999) doi:10.2307/2669917. In this model, a latent distribution is conditional on students item response, item characteristics, and conditioning variables the user includes. This latent trait is then integrated out. This software is intended to fit the same models as the existing software 'AM' https://am.air.org/. As of version 2, also allows the user to draw plausible values.

Changes in 2.2.0

Methods update

Functions are a bit clearer about some errors when data sets do not agree. In particular, when a PSU/stratum variable is missing and Taylor variance is selected it gives a plain language error.
turning on multiCore now fits the latent regressions with multiple cores too. Previously it would only fit the covariance matrix with multiple cores.
added a nearly singular model check
allow stuDat to have students that are not on the item data without throwing an error.
optimization tries to avoid Newton's method by using the lbfgs package which allows for a condition on the gradient to be set. Newton's method can be very slow for large datasets.
when Newton's method is used, the output is more verbose.
the C++ implementation of the Hessian has been sped up a bit.

From inst/NEWS.Rd in the release

Install

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

install.packages("Dire", 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("American-Institutes-for-Research/Dire")

Development version from American-Institutes-for-Research/Dire. 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-dire

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-Dire

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-Dire

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

5NOTE8OK

Check messages

NOTER code for possible problemsr-devel-linux-x86_64-debian-clang, r-devel-linux-x86_64-debian-gcc, r-devel-linux-x86_64-fedora-clang, r-devel-linux-x86_64-fedora-gcc, r-devel-windows-x86_64

Found calls to structure() using deprecated special names:
  Dire/tests/testthat/test-1-main.R (.Dim: 7, .Dimnames: 7, .Label: 1)
  Dire/tests/testthat/test-2-composite.R (.Label: 2)
  Dire/tests/testthat/test-3-gpcm.R (.Label: 6)
  Dire/tests/testthat/test-5-primerIntercept.R (.Label: 3)
  Dire/tests/testthat/test-6-primerReg.R (.Label: 3)
'.Dim' should be changed to 'dim'.
'.Dimnames' should be changed to 'dimnames'.
'.Label' should be changed to 'levels'.

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 5.9 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

NOTE8 OK, 5 NOTENow
NOTE10 OK, 3 NOTE2026-07-16
OK13 OK2026-06-09
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-06-08
OK14 OK2026-04-22
ERROR13 OK, 1 ERROR2026-04-18

Show 1 earlier changeHide 1 earlier change

OK14 OK2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 2.2.0

README· In the repository, left out of the releaseVignettesYes · 1 · staticNEWSYes · mentions 2.2.0Citation fileNoWebsiteYes · pkgdown

Help pages: 2
Examples that run: 0%1 never run · 1 hold no code
Exported functions with examples: 100%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 100%
Help pages citing references: 0%

Vignettes (1)

MML Covariance Estimation

How these are measured

Downloads

6.9K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #4,898 · ~19/day · ~573/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

66430 days

1.7K90 days

6.9K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on397 r2u3 autocran2.7K conda_forge117 c2d4u

How downloads are counted

Repository

american-institutes-for-research/dire ↗Organization: American-Institutes-for-Research

1Stars

0Forks

1Open issues

0Open PRs

0Releases

26Commits

3Commit identities

26 commits · Last activity 2025-09-19 · Default branch at 3.0.0, ahead of CRAN 2.2.0 (checked 2026-10-18)

Responsiveness

not measured

Stars over time

2021-03-22 · 12026-07-07 · 1

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

3 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 1 family in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/american-institutes-for-research/dire on 2026-10-18.

Docs source (3)

README.Rmdpkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2025-09-19

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

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

13 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing Dire adds 31 packages (17 with compiled code, 13 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: lbfgs 2.1 MB, Rcpp 1.8 MB, RcppArmadillo 1.0 MB.

Depends (1)

R >= 4.0.0

Imports (8)

foreach iteratorsmethodsMatrixhaven Rcpp lbfgsMASS

LinkingTo (2)

Rcpp RcppArmadillo

Suggests (7)

knitr rmarkdown testthat withr doParallelparallelEdSurvey

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

1direct

1indirect

Depends 1

Depends, Imports or LinkingTo, most downloaded first

EdSurvey

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (7)

Paul Bailey

Author, Maintainer since 1.0.2 (2021)

Author

Author

Author

Contributor

Contributor · added in 2.2.0

Emmanuel Sikali

pdr · added in 1.0.3

Releases (6)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
2.2.0Latest
record
2023-10-27 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
2.1.1
record
2023-01-09 · diff ↗
2.1.0
record
2022-06-30 · diff ↗
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
2.0.1
record
2022-04-19 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
drawPVs
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
1.0.3
record
2021-04-03 · diff ↗
1.0.2
record
2021-03-22
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24

Package metadata

First published: 2021-03-22
Total releases: 6 / 5 yrs
License: GPL-2 OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 4.0.0
Download size: 195 KB

Appears in task views

Psychometric Models and Methods

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("Dire")

Format

Bailey, P., Buehler, E., Doran, H., Kelley, C., Lee, S., Sikali, E., & Webb, B. (2023). Dire: Linear Regressions with a Latent Outcome Variable (Version 2.2.0) [Computer software]. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.Dire

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 Dire version 2.2.0 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-21. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-21, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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