NeuralEstimators

0.2.1

Likelihood-Free Parameter Estimation using Neural Networks

1packages depend

3.1Kdownloads / year

1.6%test coverage

12/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by Matthew Sainsbury-DaleFirst published 2024-09-116 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

An 'R' interface to the 'Julia' package 'NeuralEstimators.jl'. The package facilitates the user-friendly development of neural Bayes estimators, which are neural networks that map data to a point summary of the posterior distribution (Sainsbury-Dale et al., 2024, doi:10.1080/00031305.2023.2249522). These estimators are likelihood-free and amortised, in the sense that, once the neural networks are trained on simulated data, inference from observed data can be made in a fraction of the time required by conventional approaches. The package also supports amortised Bayesian or frequentist inference using neural networks that approximate the posterior or likelihood-to-evidence ratio (Zammit-Mangion et al., 2025, Sec. 3.2, 5.2, doi:10.48550/arXiv.2404.12484). The package accommodates any model for which simulation is feasible by allowing users to define models implicitly through simulated data.

Install

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

install.packages("NeuralEstimators", 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("msainsburydale/NeuralEstimators")

Development version from msainsburydale/NeuralEstimators. 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-neuralestimators

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

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-NeuralEstimators

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# 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-NeuralEstimators

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

Health

CRAN checks

1NOTE12OK

Failing flavors

NOTE r-devel-linux-x86_64-debian-gcc

Slowest check: 1.1 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Code health

Yes

Tests · ratio 0.35

1.6%

Coverage · measured lines

100%

Documentation · exports

Dependencies · direct

Check history

NOTE2026-08-01
12 OK · 1 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-03-10
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

READMEYes · 356 wordsVignettesNopkgdown siteNoNEWSNoCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 0%
Documented parameters: 97%
Return-value docs: 100%
References docs: 0%

Downloads

3.1K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #8,079 · ~8/day · ~258/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

26730 days

1.2K90 days

3.1K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on119 r2u3 autocran

Repository

GitHub ↗ msainsburydale/neuralestimators

14Stars

2Forks

0Open issues

0Open PRs

0Releases

91Commits

7Contributors

91 commits · Last activity 2026-04-28 · 0% stars, 30d

Stars over time

2025-06-06 · 102026-07-07 · 14

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

2 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 2 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/msainsburydale/neuralestimators on 2026-07-31.

Continuous integration (1)

GitHub Actions

CRAN release process (1)

cran-comments.md

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

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

12 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (0)

none

Imports (2)

JuliaConnectoR magrittr

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (10)

dplyr ggplot2 ggplotify ggpubr gridExtra knitr rmarkdown markdown R.rsp testthat

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

1direct

0indirect

eam

Code & Tests

People & History

People (1)

Maintainer (1)

Matthew Sainsbury-Dale

Author, Maintainer

Authors (1)

Matthew Sainsbury-Dale

Author, Maintainer

Package Timeline

6 releases. Pick two to compare their code metrics. R releases are shown for context.

0.2.1Latest
2026-04-28 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
0.2.0
2025-03-02 · diff ↗
0.1.3
2025-01-14 · diff ↗
0.1.2
2024-12-19 · diff ↗
0.1.1
2024-11-03 · diff ↗
0.1.0
2024-09-11
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24

Package metadata

First published: 2024-09-11
Total releases: 6 / 2 yrs
License: GPL (>= 2) OSI
Download size: 628 KB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

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