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GPBoost R Package

License CRAN Version Downloads

This is the R package implementation of the GPBoost library. See https://github.com/fabsig/GPBoost for more information on the modeling background and the software implementation.

Table of Contents

Examples

Installation

Installation from CRAN

The gpboost package is available on CRAN and can be installed as follows:

install.packages("gpboost", repos = "https://cran.r-project.org")

Installation from source

It is much easier to install the package from CRAN. However, the package can also be build from source as described in the following. In short, the main steps for installation are the following ones:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/fabsig/GPBoost
cd GPBoost
Rscript build_r.R

Below is a more complete installation guide.

Preparation

You need to install git and CMake first. Note that 32-bit R/Rtools is not supported for custom installation.

Windows Preparation

NOTE: Windows users may need to run with administrator rights (either R or the command prompt, depending on the way you are installing this package).

Installing a 64-bit version of Rtools is mandatory.

After installing Rtools and CMake, be sure the following paths are added to the environment variable PATH. These may have been automatically added when installing other software.

The default compiler is Visual Studio (or VS Build Tools) in Windows, with an automatic fallback to MingGW64 (i.e. it is enough to only have Rtools and CMake). To force the usage of MinGW64, you can add the --use-mingw (for R 3.x) or --use-msys2 (for R 4.x) flags (see below).

Mac OS Preparation

You can perform installation either with Apple Clang or gcc.

# replace 8 with version of gcc installed on your machine
export CXX=/usr/local/bin/g++-8 CC=/usr/local/bin/gcc-8

Install

Build and install the R package with the following commands:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/fabsig/GPBoost
cd GPBoost
Rscript build_r.R

The build_r.R script builds the package in a temporary directory called gpboost_r. It will destroy and recreate that directory each time you run the script. That script supports the following command-line options:

Note: for the build with Visual Studio/VS Build Tools in Windows, you should use the Windows CMD or PowerShell.

Testing

There is currently no integration service set up that automatically runs unit tests. However, any contribution needs to pass all unit tests in the R-package/tests/testthat directory. These tests can be run using the run_tests_coverage_R_package.R file. In any case, make sure that you run the full set of tests by speciying the following environment variable

Sys.setenv(GPBOOST_ALL_TESTS = "GPBOOST_ALL_TESTS")

before running the tests in the R-package/tests/testthat directory.

Preparing a CRAN package

This section is primarily for maintainers, but may help users and contributors to understand the structure of the R package. Most of GPBoost uses CMake to handle tasks like setting compiler and linker flags, including header file locations, and linking to other libraries. Because CRAN packages typically do not assume the presence of CMake, the R package uses an alternative method that is in the CRAN-supported toolchain for building R packages with C++ code: Autoconf. For more information on this approach, see “Writing R Extensions”.

Build a CRAN Package

From the root of the repository, run the following:

sh build-cran-package.sh

This will create a file gpboost_${VERSION}.tar.gz, where VERSION is the version of GPBoost.

Installation of a CRAN package

After building the package, you can install it with the following command:

R CMD INSTALL gpboost_*.tar.gz

Testing a CRAN package

After building the package, you can test the CRAN package as follows:

R CMD check --as-cran gpboost_*.tar.gz

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