BSU Software - MRC Biostatistics Unit

The MRC Biostatistics Unit understands the importance of creating accessible software for putting new statistical methods into practice.

Many BSU scientists are involved in such projects which are typically made freely available and open-source. Some notable examples are detailed on this page. Our website also keeps an archive of historical code produced in the unit here.

BSU GitHub page

The BSU GitHub page links to the source code of our most popular R packages, and code to reproduce analyses in some of our 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 30-year life span, BUGS has been highly influential in enabling the routine use of Bayesian methods in many areas. You can find out more about the software at the BUGS Project pages; 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
flexsurv: flexible parametric models for time-to-event data.
coloc: Colocalisation tests of two genetic traits.
MendelianRandomization: methods for performing Mendelian randomization analyses with summarized data.
PReMiuM: for Dirichlet process Bayesian clustering, or profile regression.
denstrip: for density strips and other plots for compactly illustrating distributions.
BASiCS: Bayesian Analysis of Single-Cell Sequencing data.
GUESSFM: R package for fine mapping genetic associations in dense or imputed GWAS genotype data