Downloading mirt Package Trouble

[Mun Chun Nicholas Chan]

Hello, 

I am a bit of a newbie when it comes to R, so please bare with me.

I am trying to start doing IRT analysis, and I want to download the mirt package to start. But I am having trouble here doing so. I'm using MacOS Sierra Version 10.12.6. I also have R Studio and R downloaded. 

I followed the procedure in downloading Xcode (I had to download Ver 9.2 as my Mac is using an older software), but I don't know what to do from there.

Could somebody guide me through this process? 

[Mun Chun Nicholas Chan]

Also, I am using R Studio Version 1.3.1093

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[Guido]

what is exactly the problem? 

You can install mirt by typing install.packages("mirt")

Then you load the package (you have to do this each time you restart R) with the command: library(mirt)

I also advise you to make a project in Rstudio. It will contain all your files and you don't need the specific your working directory each time. Because Studio automatically will use the project folder as working directory.

cheers, G

[Guido]

Also if you new to R, I suggest taking a look at some video's on YouTube. There are many to help you out. 

You could also start by reading this: https://www.statmethods.net/r-tutorial/index.html

And in R things can be done in a lot of different ways. For loading your data I suggest using the rio package. That wil save you al lot of headaches: https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/rio/versions/0.5.16

install.packages("rio") 

install_formats() #only the first time needed for loading all supported formats

G.

[Mun Chun Nicholas Chan]

Hi Guido, 

Thanks for the quick response! It did work!

May I ask how come in https://github.com/philchalmers/mirt it asks me to download Xcode first before installing the package? Is that something I need to be aware about?

[Guido]

Glad it worked! 

I am not sure about  Xcode, but it seems it was necessary to install the developers version (not yet released on cran) of mirt directly from GitHub. Xcode has something to do with compiling the files. I only know that for R to work properly on Mac you also need https://www.xquartz.org installed to use Xcode. But I am not a developer so I don't know really. By using install.packages you have downloaded the latest version via cran. As it says on GitHub, if you want te developers version (kind of a beta version, not yet fully released) you have to do this:

install.packages('devtools')

library('devtools')

install_github('philchalmers/mirt')

good luck with your irt analysis. 

G

[Guido]

To be clear. I never installed Xcode but only xquartz and mirt runs just fine on my Mac..