nowcast

0.1.0

Economic Nowcasting with Bridge Equations and Real-Time Evaluation

0packages depend

1.8Kdownloads / year

95.3%test coverage

12/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by Charles CoverdaleFirst published 2026-03-261 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

Provides bridge equations with optional autoregressive terms for nowcasting low-frequency macroeconomic variables (e.g. quarterly GDP) from higher-frequency indicators (e.g. monthly retail sales). Handles the ragged-edge problem where different indicators have different publication lags via mixed-frequency alignment. Includes pseudo-real-time evaluation with expanding or rolling windows, and the Diebold-Mariano test for comparing forecast accuracy following Harvey, Leybourne, and Newbold (1997) doi:10.1016/S0169-2070(96)00719-4. No API calls; designed to work with data from any source.

Install

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

install.packages("nowcast", 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("charlescoverdale/nowcast")

Development version from charlescoverdale/nowcast. 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-nowcast

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-nowcast

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-nowcast

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 0.91

95.3%

Coverage · measured lines

100%

Documentation · exports

Dependencies · direct

Check history

NOTE2026-08-01
12 OK · 1 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-03-26
5 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

READMENoVignettesNopkgdown siteNoNEWSYes · 67% structuredCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 60%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 100%
References docs: 11%

Downloads

1.8K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #9,790 · ~5/day · ~152/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

15230 days

1.1K90 days

1.8K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on37 r2u3 autocran

Repository

GitHub ↗ charlescoverdale/nowcast

3Stars

1Forks

0Open issues

0Open PRs

0Releases

26Commits

1Contributors

26 commits · Last activity 2026-05-30 · 0% stars, 30d

Stars over time

2026-03-26 · 12026-07-07 · 3

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

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

Checks run against github.com/charlescoverdale/nowcast on 2026-08-02.

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

3 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (1)

R >= 4.1.0

Imports (4)

cligrDevicesgraphicsstats

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (2)

spelling testthat

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

0direct

0indirect

Nothing depends on this yet.

Code & Tests

People & History

People (1)

Maintainer (1)

Charles Coverdale

Author, Maintainer, Copyright holder

Authors (1)

Charles Coverdale

Author, Maintainer, Copyright holder

Charles Coverdale

Author, Maintainer, Copyright holder

Package Timeline

1 release. R releases are shown for context.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
0.1.0Latest
2026-03-26 · current release
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11

Package metadata

First published: 2026-03-26
Total releases: 1 / 1 yrs
License: MIT + file LICENSE OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 4.1.0
Download size: not tracked yet
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

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