Package: binest
Type: Package
Title: Estimation of Group Means and SDs from Binned Count Data
Version: 0.2-1
Date: 2026-05-27
Depends: R (>= 3.5.0), splines, stats
Suggests: knitr, rmarkdown, R2jags
Authors@R: c(
    person("Paul T.", "von Hippel", role = c("aut", "cre"),
           email = "ph3828@eid.utexas.edu"),
    person("David J.", "Hunter", role = "aut"),
    person("J.R.", "Lockwood", role = "aut",
           comment = "Original HETOP package author"))
Description: Estimates group-level means and standard deviations from
    binned (coarsened) count data, where the within-bin scores are
    unobserved.  The package implements three methods that share a
    common output structure: bin_means() (a fast estimator that
    assumes within-district normality and uses pooled bin proportions
    to derive bin-conditional truncated-normal expectations),
    mle_hetop() (maximum likelihood for the heteroskedastic ordered
    probit model of Reardon, Shear, Castellano and Ho 2017
    <doi:10.3102/1076998616666279>), and fh_hetop() (the Bayesian
    Fay-Herriot variant of Lockwood, Castellano and Shear 2018
    <doi:10.3102/1076998618795124>).  The mle_hetop() and fh_hetop()
    functions are forked from the 'HETOP' package by J. R. Lockwood
    ('CRAN', last released 2019).  mle_hetop() has been modified to
    speed up the runtime via a vectorized inner loop and to remove
    two user-facing arguments (fixedcuts and svals) that some users
    found confusing; cutpoints and starting values are now derived
    internally from the data.
License: GPL (>= 2)
VignetteBuilder: knitr
Encoding: UTF-8
NeedsCompilation: no
Packaged: 2026-06-02 16:51:41 UTC; ph3828
Author: Paul T. von Hippel [aut, cre],
  David J. Hunter [aut],
  J.R. Lockwood [aut] (Original HETOP package author)
Maintainer: Paul T. von Hippel <ph3828@eid.utexas.edu>
Repository: CRAN
Date/Publication: 2026-06-08 18:20:08 UTC
Built: R 4.5.2; ; 2026-06-08 21:54:34 UTC; unix
