βCEA

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of work on the beta version of BCEA (I was after all born in Agrigento $-$ in the picture to the left $-$, which is a Greek city, so a beta version sounds about right…).

The new version is only available as a beta-release from our GitHub repository – usual ways to install it are through the devtools package.

There aren’t very many changes from the current CRAN version, although the one thing I did change is kind of big. In fact, I’ve embedded the web-app functionalities within the package. So, it is now possible to launch the web-app from the current R session using the new function BCEAweb. This takes as arguments three inputs: a matrix e containing $S$ simulations for the measures of effectiveness computed for the $T$ interventions; a matrix c containing the simulations for the measures of costs; and a data frame or matrix containing simulations for the model parameters.

In fact, none of the inputs is required and the user can actually launch an empty web-app, in which the inputs can be uploaded, say, from a spreadsheet (there are in fact other formats available).

I think the web-app facility is not necessary when you’ve gone through the trouble of actually installing the R package and you’re obviously using it from R. But it’s helpful, nonetheless, for example in terms of producing some standard output (perhaps even more than the actual package $-$ which I think is more flexible) and of reporting, with the cool facility based on pandoc.

This means there are a few more packages “suggested” on installation and potentially a longer compilation time for the package $-$ but nothing major. The new version is under testing but I may be able to release it on CRAN soon-ish… And there are other cool things we’re playing around (the links here give all the details!).