The MRC Biostatistics Unit understands the importance of creating accessible software for putting new statistical methods into practice.
BSU researchers routinely develop software to implement novel statistical methods, and make this software freely-available and open source.
The Unit has a GitHub page which contains mirrors of the source code for packages that we currently maintain. This also includes code to reproduce analyses in published papers.
The BUGS Project
BUGS is a language and various software packages for Bayesian inference Using Gibbs Sampling, conceived and initially developed at the BSU. Throughout its life span of over 30 years, BUGS has been highly influential in enabling the routine use of Bayesian methods in many areas.
The BUGS and WinBUGS software can be downloaded from the openbugs downloads page.
If you are using MultiBUGS you might want to investigate its stand-alone website.
R packages
A large amount of the work at the BSU is done with the R statistical software. We have developed many R packages that are widely used, including
- msm: multi-state modelling of intermittently-observed data
- coloc: Colocalisation tests of two genetic traits.
- MendelianRandomization: methods for performing Mendelian randomization analyses with summarized data.
- BASiCS: Bayesian Analysis of Single-Cell Sequencing data.
- GUESSFM: R package for fine mapping genetic associations in dense or imputed GWAS genotype data