R Observatory: Metrics for philentropy version 0.10.0

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

philentropy

0.10.0Package record

Similarity and Distance Quantification Between Probability Functions

13packages dependsuggested by 8

88.8Kdownloads / year

59.9%test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Hajk-Georg DrostCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗

Computes 46 optimized distance and similarity measures for comparing probability functions (Drost (2018) doi:10.21105/joss.00765). These comparisons between probability functions have their foundations in a broad range of scientific disciplines from mathematics to ecology. The aim of this package is to provide a core framework for clustering, classification, statistical inference, goodness-of-fit, non-parametric statistics, information theory, and machine learning tasks that are based on comparing univariate or multivariate probability functions.

Changes in 0.10.0

Updates

The core distance calculation engine has been refactored to use C++ template metaprogramming and RcppParallel. This provides significant speed and memory usage improvements for distance(), dist_one_many(), and dist_many_many(). (see PR #40 by @brownag)
Default values for optional arguments (like p for the Minkowski distance) have been updated from NA to NULL in the R function signatures to better align with the C++ backend.

From NEWS.md in the release

Install

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

install.packages("philentropy", 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("drostlab/philentropy")

Development version from drostlab/philentropy. 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-philentropy

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-philentropy

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-philentropy

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: 3.5 min · r-devel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-08-05
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK14 OK2026-04-22
ERROR13 OK, 1 ERROR2026-04-18
OK14 OK2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 0.10.0

READMEYes · 2,314 wordsVignettesYes · 4 · dynamicNEWSYes · 100% structured · mentions 0.10.0Citation fileYes · cites a publicationWebsiteYes · pkgdown

Description cites a JOSS paper

Help pages: 60
Examples that run: 100%58 run in a plain check
Exported functions with examples: 97%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 20%
Help pages citing references: 13%

Vignettes (4)

Comparing many probability density functions HTML
Distances HTML
Information Theory HTML
Introduction HTML

How these are measured

Downloads

88.8K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #1,475 · ~243/day · ~7.4K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

5.8K30 days

17.3K90 days

88.8K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on1.4K r2u4 autocran6.3K conda_forge96 c2d4u

How downloads are counted

Repository

drostlab/philentropy ↗Organization: drostlab

151Stars

22Forks

6Open issues

1Open PRs

5Releases

896Commits

6Commit identities

jensen-shannon-divergenceinformation-theorysimilarity-measuresdistance-quantificationdistance-measuresparametric-distributionsstatisticsr

License file reads as GPL-2.0 · 896 commits · Last activity 2025-12-14 · +0.7% stars, 30d

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 89%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 10
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 2

Stars over time

2026-07-14 · 1522026-10-13 · 151

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

4 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 3 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/drostlab/philentropy on 2026-10-21.

Continuous integration (1)

Travis CI (config file)

Docs source (2)

pkgdown

GitHub Pages site last deployed 2025-12-14

Research and citation (1)

JOSS paper

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v4 (2026-10-20)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

9 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing philentropy adds 3 packages (2 with compiled code, 2.7 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: Rcpp 1.8 MB, RcppParallel 744 KB, poorman 137 KB.

Depends (1)

R >= 3.1.2

Imports (4)

Rcpp RcppParallelKernSmoothpoorman

LinkingTo (2)

Rcpp RcppParallel

Suggests (4)

testthat knitr rmarkdown microbenchmark

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

13direct

0indirect

Imports 13

Suggested by 8

Show all 21 packagesHide all 21 packages

Depends, Imports or LinkingTo, most downloaded first

tidyclust biomartr supercells EcotoneFinder manydist noisyr motif iSubGen EnvNJ regional tetragon mSigTools GRelevance

Suggests, most downloaded first

Rfast themis sccore priorsense MetaNet BIDistances mmb AntibodyForests

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (3)

Hajk-Georg Drost

Author, Maintainer since 0.0.1 (2017)

Andrew Brown

Contributor · added in 0.10.0

Jakub Nowosad

Contributor · added in 0.6.0

Releases (13)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
0.10.0Latest
record
2025-11-03 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
0.9.0
record
2024-11-12 · diff ↗
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
0.8.0
record
2023-12-02 · diff ↗
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
0.7.0
record
2022-11-05 · diff ↗
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
0.6.0
record
2022-02-14 · diff ↗ ·
added 3 exports
dist_many_many, dist_one_many, dist_one_one
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
0.5.0
record
2021-05-12 · diff ↗
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
0.4.0
record
2020-01-10 · diff ↗
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
0.3.0
record
2019-02-13 · diff ↗ ·
added 44 exports
additive_symm_chi_sq, avg, bhattacharyya, canberra, chebyshev, clark_sq, cosine_dist, czekanowski, dice_dist, divergence_sq, euclidean, fidelity, gower, harmonic_mean_dist, hellinger, inner_product, intersection_dist, jaccard, jeffreys, jensen_difference, jensen_shannon, k_divergence, kulczynski_d, kullback_leibler_distance, kumar_hassebrook, kumar_johnson, lorentzian, manhattan, matusita, minkowski and 14 more

Show 7 earlier eventsHide 7 earlier events

0.2.0
record
2018-05-22 · diff ↗
R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
0.1.0
record
2018-04-10 · diff ↗
0.0.3
record
2017-05-08 · diff ↗
0.0.2
record
2017-05-04 · diff ↗
0.0.1
record
2017-04-26
R
R 3.4.0 released · 2017-04-21

Package metadata

First published: 2017-04-26
Total releases: 13 / 9 yrs
License: GPL-2 OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 3.1.2
Download size: 107 KB

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' entry:

citation("philentropy")

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

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 philentropy version 0.10.0 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-24. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-24, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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