binest: Estimation of Group Means and SDs from Binned Count Data

Estimates group-level means and standard deviations from binned (coarsened) data, where only the number of cases in each of several ordered bins is observed and the underlying values are not. The main function, fast_hetop(), fits the heteroskedastic ordered probit model of Reardon, Shear, Castellano and Ho (2017) <doi:10.3102/1076998616666279> one group at a time, solving closed-form truncated-normal score equations instead of optimizing jointly over all groups. Runtime is therefore linear in the number of groups, so thousands of schools, districts or subgroups can be fitted in under a second. Cut scores may be supplied when an agency publishes them, or estimated from the data when it does not. Output includes standard errors and confidence intervals, an optional empirical Bayes shrinkage estimator, and a per-group goodness-of-fit test of the within-group normality assumption. Also included, and deprecated, are mle_hetop() and fh_hetop(), which fit the same model by joint maximum likelihood and by Markov chain Monte Carlo (Lockwood, Castellano and Shear 2018 <doi:10.3102/1076998618795124>); they are forked from the 'HETOP' package by J. R. Lockwood and retained only for comparison.

Version: 0.3-0
Depends: R (≥ 3.5.0)
Imports: splines, stats, utils
Suggests: knitr, rmarkdown, R2jags
Published: 2026-09-22
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.binest
Author: Paul T. von Hippel [aut, cre], David J. Hunter [aut], J.R. Lockwood [aut] (Original HETOP package author)
Maintainer: Paul T. von Hippel <ph3828 at eid.utexas.edu>
License: GPL-2 | GPL-3 [expanded from: GPL (≥ 2)]
NeedsCompilation: no
Materials: README, NEWS
CRAN checks: binest results

Documentation:

Reference manual: binest.html , binest.pdf
Vignettes: Estimating District Means and SDs from Binned Test Scores, with the binest package (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: binest_0.3-0.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: binest_0.2-1.zip, r-release: binest_0.2-1.zip, r-oldrel: binest_0.2-1.zip
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): binest_0.2-1.tgz, r-oldrel (arm64): binest_0.2-1.tgz, r-release (x86_64): binest_0.3-0.tgz, r-oldrel (x86_64): binest_0.3-0.tgz
Old sources: binest archive

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