BFpack is a software package in R for flexible Bases factor testing of hypotheses on key parameters in commonly used statistical models in applied research. A key difference with existing software packages is the possibility to test multiple hypotheses (two or more) with equality (=) and/or order constraints (<, >) on the parameters of interest. Order constrained testing is particularly useful because scientific expectations are typically formulates using order restrictions (e.g., “A is expected to be larger than B, and B is expected to be larger than C”).
All analyses are done using the main function “BF“. The following models and tests are currently supported:
- Multivariate & univariate t testing (methodology)
- Multivariate & univariate normal linear regression (methodology)
- (M)AN(C)OVA (methodology)
- Generalized linear models (e.g., logistic regression, Poisson regression, etc.) (methodology)
- Correlation analysis (methodology)
- Testing of group variances (methodology)
- Network autocorrelation models (NAMs) (methodology)
- Simple meta-analyses (methodology)
- And many more… (for models that are not directly supported, it is also possible to only plug in the estimates of the key parameters, the error covariance matrix, and the sample size in the BF function; see methodology).
The Bayes factors in BFpack are based on default priors which do not require manual prior specification using external prior knowledge.
Applications of BFpack can be found in Section 4 of the manuscript or in the vignettes.
Citing BFpack
If you use BFpack for your research, please acknowledge this by referring to
Mulder, J., Williams, D. R., Gu, X., Tomarken, A., Böing-Messing, F., Olsson-Collentine, A., Meijerink, M., Menke, J., Fox, J.-P., Hoijtink, H., Rosseel, Y., Wagenmakers, E.J., and van Lissa, C. (2021). BFpack: Flexible Bayes Factor Testing of Scientific Theories in R. Journal of Statistical Software. Manuscript.
Mulder, J., van Lissa, C., Williams, D.R., Gu, X., Olsson-Collentine, A., Böing-Messing, F., Fox, J.-P., Menke, J., van Aert, R., et al. (2021). BFpack: Flexible Bayes Factor Testing of Scientific Expectations. (Version 1.0.0) [CRAN].
Mulder, J., van Lissa, C., Williams, D.R., Gu, X., Olsson-Collentine, A., Böing-Messing, F., Fox, J.-P., Menke, J., van Aert, R., et al. (2021). BFpack: Flexible Bayes Factor Testing of Scientific Expectations. (Developmental version) [github].
bfpack.info 