R Observatory: Metrics for ale version 0.5.3

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

ale

0.5.3Package record

Interpretable Machine Learning and Statistical Inference with Accumulated Local Effects (ALE)

0packages depend

7.8Kdownloads / year

62.1%test coverage

11/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Chitu OkoliCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗

Accumulated Local Effects (ALE) were initially developed as a model-agnostic approach for global explanations of the results of black-box machine learning algorithms. ALE has a key advantage over other approaches like partial dependency plots (PDP) and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP): its values represent a clean functional decomposition of the model. As such, ALE values are not affected by the presence or absence of interactions among variables in a mode. Moreover, its computation is relatively rapid. This package reimplements the algorithms for calculating ALE data and develops highly interpretable visualizations for plotting these ALE values. It also extends the original ALE concept to add bootstrap-based confidence intervals and ALE-based statistics that can be used for statistical inference. For more details, see Okoli, Chitu. 2023. “Statistical Inference Using Machine Learning and Classical Techniques Based on Accumulated Local Effects (ALE).” arXiv. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2310.09877.

Changes in 0.5.3

New features

retrieve_rds() is a documentation utility function to either retrieve a serialized RDS file from a URL or else run a code block if the URL retrieval fails. It is used in vignettes and other documentation to create or retrieve large objects that are too slow to create on the spot.

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

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

install.packages("ale", 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("tripartio/ale")

Development version from tripartio/ale. 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-ale

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-ale

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-ale

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

2NOTE11OK

Check messages

NOTERd contentsr-devel-linux-x86_64-debian-clang, r-devel-linux-x86_64-debian-gcc

Rd files without \usage:
  ‘get.ALE.Rd’ ‘get.ALEPlots.Rd’ ‘get.ModelBoot.Rd’ ‘plot.ALE.Rd’
  ‘plot.ALEPlots.Rd’ ‘plot.ModelBoot.Rd’ ‘print.ALE.Rd’
  ‘print.ALEPlots.Rd’ ‘print.ModelBoot.Rd’ ‘subset.ALEPlots.Rd’
  ‘summary.ALEPlots.Rd’
\arguments should not be documented without \usage.

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 25.3 min · r-devel-linux-x86_64-debian-clang

Status changes

NOTE11 OK, 2 NOTE2026-09-08
ERROR10 OK, 2 NOTE, 1 ERROR2026-09-07
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-07-11
OK13 OK2026-06-09
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-06-08

Show 3 earlier changesHide 3 earlier changes

OK14 OK2026-03-28
ERROR13 OK, 1 ERROR2026-03-21
OK14 OK2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 0.5.3

READMEYes · 949 wordsVignettesYes · 4 · dynamicNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 0.5.3Citation fileYes · cites a publicationWebsiteYes · pkgdown

The repository also keeps web-only articles.

Help pages: 23 (1 internal)includes a package overview page
Examples that run: 40%4 run in a plain check · 4 only when donttest examples are enabled (R CMD check --as-cran) · 2 hold no code
Exported functions with examples: 75%
Documented parameters: 80%
Return-value docs: 88%
Help pages citing references: 22%

Vignettes (4)

How these are measured

Downloads

7.8K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #5,043 · ~21/day · ~647/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

62830 days

1.6K90 days

7.8K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on113 r2u28 autocran

How downloads are counted

Repository

tripartio/ale ↗Account: tripartio

6Stars

1Forks

0Open issues

1Open PRs

0Releases

894Commits

1Commit identities

894 commits · Last activity 2026-10-08 · 0% stars, 30d · Default branch at 0.5.3.20261008, ahead of CRAN 0.5.3 (checked 2026-10-18)

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 93%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 15
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 0

Stars over time

2025-10-07 · 52026-09-06 · 6

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

14 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 6 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/tripartio/ale on 2026-10-18.

Continuous integration (2)

GitHub ActionsR CMD check workflow

The R CMD check workflow runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, and on R-devel

Docs source (4)

README.qmdpkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2026-10-08 · The repository has a site deploy workflow

pkgdown site last built 2026-10-08

Coverage (2)

Coverage reporting.covrignore

Reproducibility and dev environment (1)

data-raw/

Show all practicesHide 2 practices

CRAN release process (3)

cran-comments.mdrevdep/CRAN-SUBMISSION

Lint, format, editor (2)

VS CodeRStudio project

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

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

21 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing ale adds 76 packages (39 with compiled code, 58 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: stringi 11 MB, ggplot2 6.0 MB, poweRlaw 4.3 MB.

Depends (1)

R >= 4.2.0

Imports (19)

broom cli dplyr furrr future ggplot2 insightmethodspatchwork progressr purrr rlang S7 staccuracystatsstringr tidyr univariateMLutils

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (7)

knitrmgcvnnetreadr rmarkdown testthat yaImpute

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

0direct

0indirect

Nothing depends on this yet.

How these are counted

Code & Tests

Datasets

People & History

People (1)

Chitu Okoli

Author, Maintainer since 0.1.0 (2023)

Listed in earlier versions (1)

Dan Apley

no longer listed · 0.1.0 to 0.3.1

Releases (7)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
0.5.3Latest
record
2025-09-12 · current release · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
retrieve_rds
unarchivedReturned to CRAN
2025-08-29
0.5.2
record
2025-08-29 · diff ↗ ·
added 2 exports
customize, invert_probs
archivedRemoved from CRAN
2025-07-01
issues were not corrected in time
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
0.5.0
record
2025-04-09 · diff ↗ ·
removed 4 exports
ale, ale_ixn, create_p_funs, model_bootstrap

added 5 exports
ALE, ALEpDist, ModelBoot, get, resolve_x_cols
0.3.1
record
2025-03-10 · diff ↗
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
0.3.0
record
2024-02-14 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
create_p_funs
0.2.0
record
2023-10-19 · diff ↗
0.1.0
record
2023-08-29
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21

Package metadata

First published: 2023-08-29
Total releases: 7 / 3 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI · relicensed from GPL-2 in 0.5.0
Minimum R: ≥ 4.2.0
Bundled data: 235 KB / 2 files
Download size: 1.6 MB

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("ale")

The package provides a citation file that builds its entry when R runs it. Run citation() to see it.

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 ale version 0.5.3 [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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