Chapter 1 Introduction

This book describes how to use statistical packages developed by the Mathematical Sciences team at IHME. These packages are the result of pioneering work by Dr. Aleksandr Aravkin (director) and Dr. Peng Zheng, with auxiliary input from several others. While the goal here is to provide internal documentation for IHME staff, the packages are open source and can be run by anyone. We provide installation instructions for both audiences in Chapter 2.

The packages were originally developed in Python. Because the R programming language is more often used by public health practitioners, we created R packages that mirror the underlying Python. The code examples in the following chapters employ both R and Python.