difR

6.1.0

Collection of Methods to Detect Dichotomous, Polytomous, and Continuous Differential Item Functioning (DIF)

5packages depend

52.3Kdownloads / year

–test coverage

13/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by Sebastien BelandFirst published 2009-09-2322 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

Methods to detect differential item functioning (DIF) in dichotomous, polytomous, and continuous items, using both classical and modern approaches. These include Mantel-Haenszel procedures, logistic regression (including ordinal models), and regularization-based methods such as LASSO. Uniform and non-uniform DIF effects can be detected, and some methods support multiple focal groups. The package also provides tools for anchor purification, rest score matching, effect size estimation, and DIF simulation. See Magis, Beland, Tuerlinckx, and De Boeck (2010, Behavior Research Methods, 42, 847–862, doi:10.3758/BRM.42.3.847) for a general overview.

Install

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

install.packages("difR", 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("343Babou/difR")

Development version from 343Babou/difR. 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-difr

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-difR

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-difR

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

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

Slowest check: 6.2 min · r-devel-linux-x86_64-fedora-clang

Code health

None

Tests · ratio 0.00

not tracked

Coverage

100%

Documentation · exports

Dependencies · direct

Check history

OK2026-06-09
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-06-08
12 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-03-30
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-03-28
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-03-10
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

READMENoVignettesNopkgdown siteNoNEWSYes · 33% structuredCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 8%
Documented parameters: 98%
Return-value docs: 100%
References docs: 94%

Downloads

52.3K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #3,061 · ~143/day · ~4.4K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

1.5K30 days

4.7K90 days

52.3K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on173 r2u39 autocran72 c2d4u

Repository

GitHub ↗ 343babou/difr

0Stars

2Forks

2Open issues

1Open PRs

1Releases

5Commits

1Contributors

5 commits · Last activity 2025-05-26

Forks over time

2025-05-21 · 12026-07-07 · 2

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

1 development-tooling and community-health practice detected across 1 family in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/343babou/difr on 2026-07-19.

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

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

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

11 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (1)

R >= 3.0.0

Imports (11)

mirt ltm lme4 deltaPlotR DescTools VGAM glmnet dplyr tidyr tibble ggplot2

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (0)

none

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

5direct

2indirect

DIFshiny ShinyItemAnalysis TestAnaAPP LSAmitR easyRasch2

Code & Tests

Datasets

People & History

People (6)

Maintainer (1)

Sebastien Beland

Author, Maintainer · added in 6.0.0

Authors (6)

Sebastien Beland

Author, Maintainer · added in 6.0.0

Carl F. Falk

Author · added in 6.0.0

Josh Gilbert

Author · added in 6.1.0

Adela Hladka

Author · added in 6.1.0

David Magis

Author · added in 6.0.0

Gilles Raiche

Author · added in 6.0.0

Listed in earlier versions (4)

Gilles Raiche (UQAM)

no longer listed · 2.1 to 5.1

Sebastien Beland (UQAM)

no longer listed · 2.1 to 4.8

David Magis (U Liege)

no longer listed · 2.1 to 5.1

Sebastien Beland (U Montreal)

no longer listed · 5.0 to 5.1

Package Timeline

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

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
6.1.0Latest
2025-11-29 · current release · diff ↗
6.0.0
2025-05-26 · diff ↗
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
5.1
2020-05-13 · diff ↗
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
5.0
2018-05-14 · diff ↗
4.8
2018-04-28 · diff ↗
R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
R
R 3.4.0 released · 2017-04-21
4.7
2016-11-22 · diff ↗

Show 27 earlier events

R
R 3.3.0 released · 2016-05-03
4.6
2015-04-29 · diff ↗
R
R 3.2.0 released · 2015-04-16
R
R 3.1.0 released · 2014-04-10
4.5
2013-04-07 · diff ↗
R
R 3.0.0 released · 2013-04-03
4.4
2013-01-30 · diff ↗
4.3
2012-06-13 · diff ↗
4.2
2012-04-02 · diff ↗
R
R 2.15.0 released · 2012-03-30
R
R 2.14.0 released · 2011-10-31
4.1
2011-06-22 · diff ↗
R
R 2.13.0 released · 2011-04-13
4.0
2011-03-04 · diff ↗
3.3
2010-10-23 · diff ↗
R
R 2.12.0 released · 2010-10-15
3.2
2010-10-04 · diff ↗
3.1
2010-06-22 · diff ↗
R
R 2.11.0 released · 2010-04-22
3.0
2010-04-20 · diff ↗
2.2
2010-01-24 · diff ↗
2.1
2010-01-14 · diff ↗
2.0
2009-12-20 · diff ↗
1.1
2009-10-28 · diff ↗
R
R 2.10.0 released · 2009-10-26
1.0
2009-09-23
R
R 2.9.0 released · 2009-04-17

Package metadata

First published: 2009-09-23
Total releases: 22 / 17 yrs
License: GPL (>= 2) OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 3.0.0
Bundled data: 110 KB / 2 files
Download size: 214 KB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

Appears in task views

Psychometric Models and Methods

Report a problem with this page →