mboost

Overview

About

Maintained by Torsten HothornFirst published 2006-06-1698 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

Functional gradient descent algorithm (boosting) for optimizing general risk functions utilizing component-wise (penalised) least squares estimates or regression trees as base-learners for fitting generalized linear, additive and interaction models to potentially high-dimensional data. Models and algorithms are described in doi:10.1214/07-STS242, a hands-on tutorial is available from doi:10.1007/s00180-012-0382-5. The package allows user-specified loss functions and base-learners.

Install

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

install.packages("mboost", 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("boost-R/mboost")

Development version from boost-R/mboost. 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-mboost

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-mboost

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

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

Slowest check: 14.2 min · r-devel-linux-x86_64-fedora-clang

Code health

Yes

Tests · ratio 1.29

73.1%

Coverage · measured lines

96%

Documentation · exports

14

Dependencies · direct

Check history

OK2026-07-24
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-07-23
12 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-07-18
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-07-16
8 OK · 4 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
NOTE2026-07-10
11 OK · 2 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Show 1 earlier snapshots

OK2026-03-10
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

READMENoVignettesYes · dynamicpkgdown siteNoNEWSNoCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 94%
Documented parameters: 66%
Return-value docs: 88%
References docs: 63%

Downloads

94.8K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #1,489 · ~260/day · ~7.9K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

5.6K30 days

19.6K90 days

94.8K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on748 r2u47 autocran7.2K conda_forge1K c2d4u

Repository

GitHub ↗ boost-r/mboost

77Stars

28Forks

31Open issues

3Open PRs

0Releases

1,318Commits

17Contributors

mboostcranboosting-algorithmstutorialsmachine-learningr-languagevariable-selectionmodelling

1,318 commits · Last activity 2026-07-23

Forks over time

2026-07-14 · 272026-07-24 · 28

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

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

Checks run against github.com/boost-r/mboost on 2026-07-26.

Continuous integration (2)

Travis CIAppVeyor

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

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

15 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (5)

R >= 3.2.0methodsstatsparallelstabs

Imports (10)

Matrixsurvivalsplineslatticennls quadprogutilsgraphicsgrDevicespartykit

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (15)

TH.dataMASSfields BayesX gbm mlbench RColorBrewerrpartrandomForestnnetkangar00 bibtex lme4nlmecobs

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

36direct

2indirect

People & History

People (8)

Maintainer (1)

Torsten Hothorn

Maintainer, Author

Authors (5)

Torsten Hothorn

Maintainer, Author

Peter Buehlmann

Author · added in 2.0-0

Benjamin Hofner

Author · added in 2.6.0

Thomas Kneib

Author · added in 2.6.0

Matthias Schmid

Author · added in 2.6.0

Contributors (3)

Andreas Mayr

Contributor · added in 2.8-0

Fabian Otto-Sobotka

Contributor · added in 2.9-4

Fabian Scheipl

Contributor · added in 2.1-2

Listed in earlier versions (3)

Peter Buhlmann

no longer listed · 0.4-6 to 2.10.1

Peter Buhlmann with contributions by Thomas Kneib

no longer listed · 1.0-0 to 1.0-1

Fabian Sobotka

no longer listed · 2.1-2 to 2.9-3

Package Timeline

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

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Package metadata

First published: 2006-06-16
Total releases: 98 / 20 yrs
License: GPL-2 OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 3.2.0
Download size: 1.7 MB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

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