philentropy

0.10.0

Similarity and Distance Quantification Between Probability Functions

25packages depend

99.7Kdownloads / year

59.9%test coverage

12/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by Hajk-Georg DrostFirst published 2017-04-2613 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

Computes 46 optimized distance and similarity measures for comparing probability functions (Drost (2018) doi:10.21105/joss.00765). These comparisons between probability functions have their foundations in a broad range of scientific disciplines from mathematics to ecology. The aim of this package is to provide a core framework for clustering, classification, statistical inference, goodness-of-fit, non-parametric statistics, information theory, and machine learning tasks that are based on comparing univariate or multivariate probability functions.

Install

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

install.packages("philentropy", 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("drostlab/philentropy")

Development version from drostlab/philentropy. 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-philentropy

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-philentropy

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-philentropy

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: 3.0 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Code health

Yes

Tests · ratio 1.20

59.9%

Coverage · measured lines

100%

Documentation · exports

Dependencies · direct

Check history

NOTE2026-08-01
12 OK · 1 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-04-22
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-04-18
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-03-10
14 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

READMEYes · 2,314 wordsVignettesYes · dynamicpkgdown siteNoNEWSYes · 100% structuredCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 100%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 20%
References docs: 13%

Downloads

99.7K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #1,541 · ~273/day · ~8.3K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

4.5K30 days

18.4K90 days

99.7K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on750 r2u5.4K conda_forge51 c2d4u

Repository

GitHub ↗ drostlab/philentropy

151Stars

22Forks

6Open issues

1Open PRs

5Releases

896Commits

6Contributors

jensen-shannon-divergenceinformation-theorysimilarity-measuresdistance-quantificationdistance-measuresparametric-distributionsstatisticsr

License GPL-2.0 · 896 commits · Last activity 2025-12-14 · -0.7% stars, 30d

Stars over time

2026-07-14 · 1522026-07-30 · 151

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

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

Checks run against github.com/drostlab/philentropy on 2026-07-31.

Continuous integration (1)

Travis CI

Research and citation (1)

JOSS paper

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

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

9 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (1)

R >= 3.1.2

Imports (4)

Rcpp RcppParallelKernSmoothpoorman

LinkingTo (2)

Rcpp RcppParallel

Suggests (4)

testthat knitr rmarkdown microbenchmark

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

25direct

0indirect

EcotoneFinder EnvNJ GRelevance SemNeT SimuRg biomartr iSubGen mSigTools manydist motif naive noisyr regional segen spooky supercells tetragon tidyclust AntibodyForests MetaNet Rfast mmb priorsense sccore themis

Code & Tests

People & History

People (3)

Maintainer (1)

Hajk-Georg Drost

Author, Maintainer

Authors (1)

Hajk-Georg Drost

Author, Maintainer

Contributors (2)

Andrew Brown

Contributor · added in 0.10.0

Jakub Nowosad

Contributor · added in 0.6.0

Package Timeline

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

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
0.10.0Latest
2025-11-03 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
0.9.0
2024-11-12 · diff ↗
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
0.8.0
2023-12-02 · diff ↗
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
0.7.0
2022-11-05 · diff ↗
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
0.6.0
2022-02-14 · diff ↗
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
0.5.0
2021-05-12 · diff ↗
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
0.4.0
2020-01-10 · diff ↗
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
0.3.0
2019-02-13 · diff ↗

Show 7 earlier events

0.2.0
2018-05-22 · diff ↗
R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
0.1.0
2018-04-10 · diff ↗
0.0.3
2017-05-08 · diff ↗
0.0.2
2017-05-04 · diff ↗
0.0.1
2017-04-26
R
R 3.4.0 released · 2017-04-21

Package metadata

First published: 2017-04-26
Total releases: 13 / 9 yrs
License: GPL-2 OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 3.1.2
Download size: 107 KB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

Report a problem with this page →