DiSCos

0.1.4

Distributional Synthetic Controls Estimation

0packages depend

4.5Kdownloads / year

82.6%test coverage

13/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by David Van DijckeFirst published 2024-03-146 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

The method of synthetic controls is a widely-adopted tool for evaluating causal effects of policy changes in settings with observational data. In many settings where it is applicable, researchers want to identify causal effects of policy changes on a treated unit at an aggregate level while having access to data at a finer granularity. This package implements a simple extension of the synthetic controls estimator, developed in Gunsilius (2023) doi:10.3982/ECTA18260, that takes advantage of this additional structure and provides nonparametric estimates of the heterogeneity within the aggregate unit. The idea is to replicate the quantile function associated with the treated unit by a weighted average of quantile functions of the control units. The package contains tools for aggregating and plotting the resulting distributional estimates, as well as for carrying out inference on them.

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("DiSCos", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("Davidvandijcke/DiSCos")

Development version from Davidvandijcke/DiSCos. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-discos

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-DiSCos

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed).

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

Slowest check: 5.2 min · r-devel-linux-x86_64-fedora-clang

Check history

OK2026-06-23
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-06-22
12 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-06-01
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-05-29
11 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 2 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-05-06
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Show 9 earlier snapshots

ERROR2026-05-04
12 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-04-09
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-04-02
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-03-25
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-03-22
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-03-21
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-03-20
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-03-15
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-03-10
12 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 2 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

Documentation signals are not tracked yet for this package.

Downloads

4.5K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #6,699 · ~12/day · ~375/mo

DiSCos Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

39930 days

1.5K90 days

4.5K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on147 r2u15 autocran

Repository

GitHub ↗ davidvandijcke/discos

5Stars

5Forks

2Open issues

2Open PRs

3Releases

112Commits

4Contributors

112 commits · Last activity 2026-07-12 · 0% stars, 30d

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

5 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 5 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/davidvandijcke/discos on 2026-07-19.

Continuous integration (1)

GitHub Actions

Reproducibility and dev environment (1)

data-raw/

CRAN release process (1)

cran-comments.md

Docs source (1)

README.Rmd

Show all practices

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v1 (2026-07-18)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

14 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (3)

R >= 2.10data.table ggplot2

Imports (8)

CVXR pracma RdpackparallelevmixutilsextremeStatMASS

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (7)

haven latex2exp knitr rmarkdown maps testthat (>= 3.0.0)quadprog

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

0direct

0indirect

Nothing depends on this yet.

Code & Tests

People & History

People (3)

Maintainer (1)

David Van Dijcke

Author, Maintainer

Authors (3)

David Van Dijcke

Author, Maintainer

Florian Gunsilius

Author

Siyun He

Author

Package Timeline

6 releases. R releases are shown for context.

0.1.4Latest
2026-07-13 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
0.1.3
2026-03-07 · diff ↗
0.1.2
2026-02-04 · diff ↗
unarchivedReturned to CRAN
2026-02-04
archivedRemoved from CRAN
2025-11-07
issues were not corrected despite reminders
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
0.1.1
2024-07-23 · diff ↗
0.1.0
2024-05-13 · diff ↗
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
0.0.1
2024-03-14
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21

Package metadata

First published: 2024-03-14
Total releases: 6 / 2 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI
Download size: 1.9 MB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

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