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Record W7126223455 · doi:10.18637/jss.v115.i02

<b>sdmTMB</b> : An <i>R</i> Package for Fast, Flexible, and User-Friendly Generalized Linear Mixed Effects Models with Spatial and Spatiotemporal Random Fields

2025· article· en· W7126223455 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Statistical Software · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicSoil Geostatistics and Mapping
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersFisheries and Oceans CanadaBird Studies Canada
KeywordsRandom fieldInferenceGaussianFlexibility (engineering)Bayesian probabilityMarkov random fieldRandom effects modelGeneralized linear mixed modelSpatial analysisSpatial correlation

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Geostatistical spatial or spatiotemporal data are common across scientific fields. However, appropriate models to analyze these data, such as generalized linear mixed effects models (GLMMs) with Gaussian Markov random fields (GMRFs), are computationally intensive and challenging for many users to implement. Here, we introduce the R package sdmTMB, which extends the flexible interface familiar to users of lme4, glmmTMB, and mgcv to include spatial and spatiotemporal latent GMRFs using the stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) approach. SPDE matrices are constructed with fmesher, and estimation is conducted via maximum marginal likelihood with TMB or via Bayesian inference with tmbstan and rstan. We describe the model and explore case studies that illustrate sdmTMB's flexibility in implementing penalized smoothers, non-stationary processes (time-varying and spatially varying coefficients), hurdle models, cross-validation, and anisotropy (directionally dependent spatial correlation). Finally, we compare the functionality, speed, and interfaces of related software, demonstrating that sdmTMB can be an order of magnitude faster than R-INLA. We hope sdmTMB will help open this useful class of models to more geostatistical analysts.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.753
Threshold uncertainty score0.542

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.249
Teacher spread0.240 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it