binest: Estimation of Group Means and SDs from Binned Count Data

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.

Version: 0.2-1
Depends: R (≥ 3.5.0), splines, stats
Suggests: knitr, rmarkdown, R2jags
Published: 2026-06-08
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.binest (may not be active yet)
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 at eid.utexas.edu>
License: GPL-2 | GPL-3 [expanded from: GPL (≥ 2)]
NeedsCompilation: no
Materials: README, NEWS
CRAN checks: binest results

Documentation:

Reference manual: binest.html , binest.pdf
Vignettes: Estimating District Means from Binned Test Scores with binest (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: binest_0.2-1.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: not available, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: not available
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): not available, r-oldrel (arm64): not available, r-release (x86_64): binest_0.2-1.tgz, r-oldrel (x86_64): not available

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