nimbleEcology: custom NIMBLE distributions for ecologists

[Ben Goldstein]

Hi all,

I'd like to advertise an auxiliary NIMBLE package, nimbleEcology.

nimbleEcology contains a set of distributions corresponding to some common ecological models. These distributions are implemented to integrate over latent states in the model. It's designed to integrate smoothly with NIMBLE model coding.

The following distributions are available:

• dOcc (occupancy model)
• dDynOcc (dynamic occupancy model)
• dHMM (hidden Markov model)
• dDHMM (dynamic hidden Markov model)
• dCJS (Cormack-Jolly-Seber or mark-recapture model)
• dNmixture (N-mixture model)

nimbleEcology and its documentation are now available on CRAN and GitHub. It was also discussed in the recent Ecol & Evol paper "One size does not fit all: Customizing MCMC methods for hierarchical models using NIMBLE" (Ponisio et al., 2020). See also this blog post with example code on r-nimble.org.

Thanks,

Ben Goldstein