Implementation of a Bayesian approach for estimating a mixture of gamma distributions in which the mixing occurs over the shape parameter. This family provides a flexible and novel approach for modeling heavy-tailed distributions, it is computationally efficient, and it only requires to specify a prior distribution for a single parameter.

It provides functions to generate operating characteristics and to calculate Sequential Conditional Probability Ratio Tests(SCPRT) efficacy and futility boundary values along with sample/event size of Multi-Arm Multi-Stage(MAMS) trials for different outcomes. The package is based on Jianrong Wu, Yimei Li, Liang Zhu (2023) <doi:10.1002/sim.9682>, Jianrong Wu, Yimei Li (2023) "Group Sequential Multi-Arm Multi-Stage Survival Trial Design with Treatment Selection"(Manuscript accepted for publication) and Jianrong Wu, Yimei Li, Shengping Yang (2023) "Group Sequential Multi-Arm Multi-Stage Trial Design with Ordinal Endpoints"(In preparation).

Estimating trait heritability and handling overfitting. This package includes a collection of functions for (1) estimating genetic variance-covariances and calculate trait heritability; and (2) handling overfitting by calculating the variance components and the heritability through cross validation.

Provides automated downloading, parsing, cleaning, unit
    conversion and formatting of Global Surface Summary of the Day
    ('GSOD') weather data from the from the USA National Centers for
    Environmental Information ('NCEI').  Units are converted from from
    United States Customary System ('USCS') units to International System
    of Units ('SI').  Stations may be individually checked for number of
    missing days defined by the user, where stations with too many missing
    observations are omitted.  Only stations with valid reported latitude
    and longitude values are permitted in the final data.  Additional
    useful elements, saturation vapour pressure ('es'), actual vapour
    pressure ('ea') and relative humidity ('RH') are calculated from the
    original data using the improved August-Roche-Magnus approximation
    (Alduchov & Eskridge 1996) and included in the final data set.  The
    resulting metadata include station identification information,
    country, state, latitude, longitude, elevation, weather observations
    and associated flags.  For information on the 'GSOD' data from 'NCEI',
    please see the 'GSOD' 'readme.txt' file available from,
    <https://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod/readme.txt>.