Structure for Organizing Monte Carlo Simulation Designs

Provides tools to safely and efficiently organize and execute Monte Carlo simulation experiments in R. The package controls the structure and back-end of Monte Carlo simulation experiments by utilizing a generate-analyse-summarise workflow. The workflow safeguards against common simulation coding issues, such as automatically re-simulating non-convergent results, prevents inadvertently overwriting simulation files, catches error and warning messages during execution, implicitly supports parallel processing with high-quality random number generation, and provides tools for managing high-performance computing (HPC) array jobs submitted to schedulers such as SLURM. For a pedagogical introduction to the package see Sigal and Chalmers (2016) . For a more in-depth overview of the package and its design philosophy see Chalmers and Adkins (2020) .

SimDesign

Structure for Organizing Monte Carlo Simulation Designs

Installation

To install the latest stable version of the package from CRAN, please use the following in your R console:

install.packages('SimDesign')

To install the Github version of the package with remotes, type the following (assuming you have already installed the remotes package from CRAN).

library('remotes')
install_github('philchalmers/SimDesign')

Getting started

For a description pertaining to the philosophy and general workflow of the package it is helpful to first read through the following: Chalmers, R. Philip, Adkins, Mark C. (2020) Writing Effective and Reliable Monte Carlo Simulations with the SimDesign Package, The Quantitative Methods for Psychology, 16(4), 248-280. doi: 10.20982/tqmp.16.4.p248

Coding examples found within this article range from relatively simple (e.g., a re-implementation of one of Hallgren's (2013) simulation study examples, as well as possible extensions to the simulation design) to more advanced real-world simulation experiments (e.g., Flora and Curran's (2004) simulation study). For additional information and instructions about how to use the package please refer to the examples in the associated Github wiki.