R Observatory: Metrics for brokenstick version 2.7.0

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

brokenstick

2.7.0Package record

Broken Stick Model for Irregular Longitudinal Data

0packages depend

5.9Kdownloads / year

51.4%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Stef van BuurenCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗

Data on multiple individuals through time are often sampled at times that differ between persons. Irregular observation times can severely complicate the statistical analysis of the data. The broken stick model approximates each subject’s trajectory by one or more connected line segments. The times at which segments connect (breakpoints) are identical for all subjects and under control of the user. A well-fitting broken stick model effectively transforms individual measurements made at irregular times into regular trajectories with common observation times. Specification of the model requires three variables: time, measurement and subject. The model is a special case of the linear mixed model, with time as a linear B-spline and subject as the grouping factor. The main assumptions are: subjects are exchangeable, trajectories between consecutive breakpoints are straight, random effects follow a multivariate normal distribution, and unobserved data are missing at random. The package contains functions for fitting the broken stick model to data, for predicting curves in new data and for plotting broken stick estimates. The package supports two optimization methods, and includes options to structure the variance-covariance matrix of the random effects. The analyst may use the software to smooth growth curves by a series of connected straight lines, to align irregularly observed curves to a common time grid, to create synthetic curves at a user-specified set of breakpoints, to estimate the time-to-time correlation matrix and to predict future observations. See doi:10.18637/jss.v106.i07 for additional documentation on background, methodology and applications.

Changes in 2.7.0

Maintenance release
Changes relative URL to absolute URL in manual.html to pass CRAN checks
Repairs a broken link in README
Applies AIR formatting to all .R files
Adds GH workflows to check package via rhub
Solves the aes_string() deprecation warning (#11)

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

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

install.packages("brokenstick", 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("growthcharts/brokenstick")

Development version from growthcharts/brokenstick. 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-brokenstick

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-brokenstick

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-brokenstick

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: 4.7 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-08-05
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK13 OK2026-05-12
WARNING12 OK, 1 WARNING2026-05-11
OK6 OK2026-03-14

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 2.7.0

READMEYes · 779 wordsVignettesYes · 4 · dynamicNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 2.7.0Citation fileYes · cites a publicationWebsiteYes · pkgdown

Cites a JSS article

Help pages: 25includes a package overview page
Examples that run: 71%5 run in a plain check · 1 only when donttest examples are enabled (R CMD check --as-cran) · 1 never run
Exported functions with examples: 56%
Documented parameters: 95%
Return-value docs: 100%
Help pages citing references: 16%

Vignettes (4)

How these are measured

Downloads

5.9K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #5,434 · ~16/day · ~495/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

57930 days

1.5K90 days

5.9K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on154 r2u22 autocran46 c2d4u

How downloads are counted

Repository

growthcharts/brokenstick ↗Organization: growthcharts

10Stars

3Forks

1Open issues

0Open PRs

10Releases

599Commits

1Commit identities

linear-mixed-modelslongitudinal-datab-splinegrowth-curves

599 commits · Last activity 2026-03-13 · +11.1% stars, 30d

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 100%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 44
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 0

Stars over time

2024-11-17 · 82026-10-19 · 10

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

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

Checks run against github.com/growthcharts/brokenstick on 2026-10-11.

Continuous integration (1)

GitHub Actions

Docs source (3)

README.Rmdpkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2026-03-13

pkgdown site last built 2026-03-13

Reproducibility and dev environment (1)

data-raw/

CRAN release process (1)

cran-comments.md

Show all practicesHide 2 practices

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

Git structural (1)

.gitattributes

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

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

17 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing brokenstick adds 31 packages (18 with compiled code, 30 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: stringi 11 MB, lme4 4.1 MB, nloptr 2.1 MB.

Depends (1)

R >= 3.5.0

Imports (9)

coda dplyr lme4 matrixsamplingmethodsrlangsplinesstatstidyr

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (15)

AGD bookdown ggplot2grDevicesgridExtra knitrlatticeMASSMatrixmice mvtnorm plyr svglite testthat rmarkdown

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)

Stef van Buuren

Author, Maintainer since 1.1.0 (2020)

Releases (8)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
unarchivedReturned to CRAN
2026-03-13
2.7.0Latest
record
2026-03-13 · current release · diff ↗
archivedRemoved from CRAN
2026-03-02
issues were not corrected despite reminders
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
unarchivedReturned to CRAN
2025-03-31
2.6.0
record
2025-03-31 · diff ↗ ·
added 1 export
robust_chol2inv
archivedRemoved from CRAN
2025-03-21
the 'maintainer' is deleting notifications unread
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
2.5.0
record
2023-03-22 · diff ↗
2.4.0
record
2022-10-30 · diff ↗
2.3.0
record
2022-09-07 · diff ↗
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
2.1.0
record
2022-03-30 · diff ↗
2.0.0
record
2021-11-11 · diff ↗ ·
removed 4 exports
EB, control_brokenstick, make_basis, parse_formula

added 3 exports
get_omega, plot_trajectory, set_control

Show 3 earlier eventsHide 3 earlier events

R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
1.1.0
record
2020-11-02
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24

Package metadata

First published: 2020-11-02
Total releases: 8 / 6 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 3.5.0
Bundled data: 462 KB / 4 files
Download size: 1.1 MB

Appears in task views

Missing Data

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' entry:

citation("brokenstick")

The package provides a citation file, so citation() returns the authors' own entry.

It points to 10.18637/jss.v106.i07.

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 brokenstick version 2.7.0 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-19. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-19, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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