[ESS] Emacs speaks more statistics: ADMB, TMB, and AD Studio

[Arni Magnusson]

Dear ESS users,

I'd like to highlight two Emacs major modes, `admb-mode' for AD Model Builder (ADMB) and `tmb-mode' for Template Model Builder (TMB), that might be of interest to you as Emacs users and experts in statistical modelling:

  https://github.com/admb-project/admb/tree/master/contrib/emacs
  https://github.com/kaskr/adcomp/tree/master/emacs

ADMB and TMB are software platforms that utilize automatic differentiation and Laplace approximation to estimate parameters and random effects in a fast and reliable way. ADMB is a stand-alone application, while TMB is implemented as an R package on CRAN.

  ADMB (admb-project.org)
  Paper: http://tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10556788.2011.597854


  TMB (tmb-project.org)
  Paper: https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v070i05

Needless to say, `admb-mode' and `tmb-mode' work very well with `R-mode' and ESS in general. While ADMB and TMB models are written in C++, users typically employ R scripts to handle model input and output.

Finally, to facilitate the installation of ADMB, GCC, GDB, and Emacs with packages, there's a convenient installer for Windows called AD Studio. The following website includes download information and a user manual, that gives an overview and tutorial of ADMB and TMB:

  https://github.com/admb-project/adstudio

The purpose of sending this email is both to inform potential users about the availability of these free and powerful statistical modelling platforms, but also perhaps raise the question whether `admb-mode' and/or `tmb-mode' might belong as part of ESS. If not, then simple links from http://ess.r-project.org/index.php?Section=miscellaneous might be useful for ESS users who are exploring ESS-related software.

All the best,

Arni Magnusson
President, ADMB-TMB Foundation