footBayes: Fitting Bayesian and MLE Football Models

This is the first package allowing for the estimation, visualization and prediction of the most well-known football models: double Poisson, bivariate Poisson, Skellam, student_t, diagonal-inflated bivariate Poisson, and zero-inflated Skellam. It supports both maximum likelihood estimation (MLE, for 'static' models only) and Bayesian inference. For Bayesian methods, it incorporates several techniques: MCMC sampling with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, variational inference using either the Pathfinder algorithm or Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI), and the Laplace approximation. The package compiles all the 'CmdStan' models once during installation using the 'instantiate' package. The model construction relies on the most well-known football references, such as Dixon and Coles (1997) <doi:10.1111/1467-9876.00065>, Karlis and Ntzoufras (2003) <doi:10.1111/1467-9884.00366> and Egidi, Pauli and Torelli (2018) <doi:10.1177/1471082X18798414>.

Version:	2.0.0
Depends:	R (≥ 4.2.0)
Imports:	rstan (≥ 2.18.1), instantiate, reshape2, ggplot2, ggridges, matrixStats, extraDistr, metRology, dplyr, tidyr, numDeriv, magrittr, rlang, posterior
Suggests:	testthat (≥ 3.0.0), knitr (≥ 1.37), rmarkdown (≥ 2.10), loo, bayesplot, cmdstanr (≥ 0.6.0)
Published:	2025-05-16
DOI:	10.32614/CRAN.package.footBayes
Author:	Leonardo Egidi [aut, cre], Roberto Macrì Demartino [aut], Vasilis Palaskas. [aut]
Maintainer:	Leonardo Egidi <legidi at units.it>
BugReports:	https://github.com/leoegidi/footbayes/issues
License:	GPL-2
URL:	https://github.com/leoegidi/footbayes
NeedsCompilation:	yes
SystemRequirements:	CmdStan (https://mc-stan.org/users/interfaces/cmdstan), pandoc (>= 1.12.3), pandoc-citeproc
Additional_repositories:	https://stan-dev.r-universe.dev/
Materials:	README NEWS
In views:	SportsAnalytics
CRAN checks:	footBayes results

Documentation:

Reference manual:	footBayes.pdf
Vignettes:	Fitting football models and visualizing predictions with the 'footBayes' package (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source:	footBayes_2.0.0.tar.gz
Windows binaries:	r-devel: footBayes_2.0.0.zip, r-release: footBayes_2.0.0.zip, r-oldrel: footBayes_2.0.0.zip
macOS binaries:	r-release (arm64): footBayes_2.0.0.tgz, r-oldrel (arm64): footBayes_2.0.0.tgz, r-release (x86_64): footBayes_2.0.0.tgz, r-oldrel (x86_64): footBayes_2.0.0.tgz
Old sources:	footBayes archive

Linking:

Please use the canonical form https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=footBayes to link to this page.