Transformations that allow obtaining a flat table from
    reports in text or Excel format that contain data in the form of pivot
    tables. They can be defined for a single report and applied to a set
    of reports.

On import, the XML information is converted to a dataframe that reflects the hierarchical XML structure. Intuitive functions allow to navigate within this transparent XML data structure (without any knowledge of 'XPath'). 'flatXML' also provides tools to extract data from the XML into a flat dataframe that can be used to perform statistical operations. It also supports converting dataframes to XML.

Streamlines the process of updating changelogs (NEWS.md)
    and versioning R packages developed in git repositories.

Perform variable selection in settings with possibly missing data
    based on extrinsic (algorithm-specific) and intrinsic (population-level)
    variable importance. Uses a Super Learner ensemble to estimate the
    underlying prediction functions that give rise to estimates of variable importance. 
    For more information about the methods, please see Williamson and Huang (2024) <doi:10.1515/ijb-2023-0059>.

The FLEX method, developed by Yoon and Choi (2013) <doi:10.1007/978-3-642-33042-1_21>, performs least squares estimation for fuzzy predictors and outcomes, generating crisp regression coefficients by minimizing the distance between observed and predicted outcomes. It also provides functions for fuzzifying data and inference tasks, including significance testing, fit indices, and confidence interval estimation.

A faster implementation of Bayesian Causal Forests (BCF; Hahn et al. (2020) <doi:10.1214/19-BA1195>), which uses regression tree ensembles to estimate the conditional average treatment effect of a binary treatment on a scalar output as a function of many covariates. This implementation avoids many redundant computations and memory allocations present in the original BCF implementation, allowing the model to be fit to larger datasets. The implementation was originally developed for the 2022 American Causal Inference Conference's Data Challenge. See Kokandakar et al. (2023) <doi:10.1353/obs.2023.0024> for more details.