Sebastian Krantz's Avatar

Sebastian Krantz

@sebkrantz.bsky.social

PhD graduate in Quantitative Economics working on Africa/Infrastructure and creator of {collapse} (@rcollapse.bsky.social). Website: https://sebastiankrantz.com/

68 Followers  |  36 Following  |  14 Posts  |  Joined: 22.12.2024
Posts Following

Posts by Sebastian Krantz (@sebkrantz.bsky.social)

Introducing flownet: Efficient Transport Modeling in R - R, Econometrics, High Performance

Release blog post is here: sebkrantz.github.io/Rblog/2026/0... #Rstats #DataScience

09.02.2026 21:14 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Transport Modeling in R High-performance tools for transport modeling - network processing, route enumeration, and traffic assignment in R. The package implements the Path-Sized Logit model for traffic assignment - Ben-Akiva...

I’m thrilled to introduce flownet (sebkrantz.github.io/flownet/), a new R package for transport modeling, supporting stochastic or deterministic traffic assignment to large networks, and powerful tools for (multimodal) network processing/simplification: sebkrantz.github.io/Rblog/2026/0... #Rstats

09.02.2026 19:06 β€” πŸ‘ 21    πŸ” 4    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
fixest is an R package for fast and flexible econometric estimation, providing a comprehensive toolkit for applied researchers. The package particularly excels at fixed-effects estimation, supported by a novel fixed-point acceleration algorithm implemented in C++. This algorithm achieves rapid convergence across a broad class of data contexts and further enables estimation of complex models, including those with varying slopes, in a highly efficient manner. Beyond computational speed, fixest provides a unified syntax for a wide variety of models: ordinary least squares, instrumental variables, generalized linear models, maximum likelihood, and difference-in-differences estimators. An expressive formula interface enables multiple estimations, stepwise regressions, and variable interpolation in a single call, while users can make on-the-fly inference adjustments using a variety of built-in robust standard errors. Finally, fixest provides methods for publication-ready regression tables and coefficient plots. Benchmarks against leading alternatives in R, Python, and Julia demonstrate best-in-class performance, and the paper includes many worked examples illustrating the core functionality.

fixest is an R package for fast and flexible econometric estimation, providing a comprehensive toolkit for applied researchers. The package particularly excels at fixed-effects estimation, supported by a novel fixed-point acceleration algorithm implemented in C++. This algorithm achieves rapid convergence across a broad class of data contexts and further enables estimation of complex models, including those with varying slopes, in a highly efficient manner. Beyond computational speed, fixest provides a unified syntax for a wide variety of models: ordinary least squares, instrumental variables, generalized linear models, maximum likelihood, and difference-in-differences estimators. An expressive formula interface enables multiple estimations, stepwise regressions, and variable interpolation in a single call, while users can make on-the-fly inference adjustments using a variety of built-in robust standard errors. Finally, fixest provides methods for publication-ready regression tables and coefficient plots. Benchmarks against leading alternatives in R, Python, and Julia demonstrate best-in-class performance, and the paper includes many worked examples illustrating the core functionality.

arXivπŸ“ˆπŸ€–
Fast and user-friendly econometrics estimations: The R package fixest
By Berg\'e, Butts, McDermott

30.01.2026 16:34 β€” πŸ‘ 50    πŸ” 7    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 5

Happy to receive PR's of course...

29.01.2026 22:05 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Yeah, that is the frontier. Would be nice to see it implemented in R, but that would need to be by a macroeconomics practitioner who is into that stuff (which I am no longer).

29.01.2026 22:04 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
Releasing dfms 1.0: Fast and Feature-Rich Estimation of Dynamic Factor Models in R - R, Econometrics, High Performance

Proper link to the post: sebkrantz.github.io/Rblog/2026/0...

29.01.2026 21:46 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Dynamic Factor Models for R Efficient estimation of Dynamic Factor Models using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm or Two-Step (2S) estimation, supporting datasets with missing data and mixed-frequency nowcasting applic...

I'm excited to share the release and rOpenSci publication of dfms 1.0 (docs.ropensci.org/dfms), a high-performance, feature-rich implementation of Dynamics Factor Models for R, supporting mixed-frequency estimation and news decomposition for nowcasting. See also blog post: sebkrantz.github.io/Rblog/

29.01.2026 21:34 β€” πŸ‘ 21    πŸ” 7    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
From Zanzibar to Cape Town by Public Transport | Blog of Sebastian Krantz Chronicles of a 6 week solo adventure through Southern Africa

I've started a new personal blog focused on research, career reflections, and travel experiences. The first post documents my recent 6-week trip through Southern Africa, from Zanzibar to Cape Town by Public Transport. FYI, enjoy!

sebkrantz.github.io/blog/posts/f...

03.10.2025 21:09 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Introduction to dfms

Version 0.3.0 of the {dfms} package for dynamic factor modelling in R just made it to CRAN, adding support for monthly + quarterly mixed frequency estimation. This allows for easy business cycle indicator estimation. More at sebkrantz.github.io/dfms/article... and sebkrantz.github.io/dfms/. #rstats

18.05.2025 19:10 β€” πŸ‘ 6    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Post image

{collapse} 2.1.0 is out! It introduces a new fslice() function (sebkrantz.github.io/collapse/ref...), a new theory-consistent weighted quantile algorithm (sebkrantz.github.io/collapse/ref...) with excellent properties. And some convenience features such as join requirements: #rstats #DataScience

10.03.2025 21:53 β€” πŸ‘ 7    πŸ” 3    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Post image

Feel free to join the ECA webinar if you want to see some crazy continent-scale spatial economic modelling.
πŸ“… Feb 10 | 14:00-15:30 EAT
Join industry experts as we explore the costs, benefits, and solutions for Africa’s infrastructure development. πŸŒπŸ’‘
πŸ”— Register now: bit.ly/3PWKynU

07.02.2025 16:50 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Benchmarks An Extensible Suite of High-Performance and Low-Dependency Packages for Statistical Computing and Data Manipulation in R - fastverse/fastverse

So I think for the moment I'll keep the format unless a reviwer demands something different. I think it is simply more transparent and this is a technical article. There are many benchmarks involving collapse here (github.com/fastverse/fa...), some of which use visual modes of presentation.

06.02.2025 21:08 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

And I do have an overall space constraint with this article, which is at 32 pages now. So the only way would be compressing multiple operations in a plot (like duckdb benchmarks). While this may be nice, it does not make for easy syntax comparison and interpretation either.

06.02.2025 21:06 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Ok, thanks for elaborating. I agree that a plot would be nicer, though not necessarily easier to read. Take for example the grouped median benchmark. dplyr's runtime was 5.62s, collapse was 14.6ms - that's a factor ~400. To present that on a plot, it would have to be logarithmic...

06.02.2025 21:03 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Ok, thanks. And that's interesting. What do you find difficult about them?

The issue I have with plots is that they are more space consuming, and show one kind of information, wheras the tables have at least 3 useful information: Average and median runtime and memory consumption.

06.02.2025 16:15 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
collapse: Advanced and Fast Statistical Computing and Data Transformation in R collapse is a large C/C++-based infrastructure package facilitating complex statistical computing, data transformation, and exploration tasks in R - at outstanding levels of performance and memory eff...

The {collapse} (@rcollapse.bsky.social) arXiv paper has just been updated - following extensive revision: arxiv.org/abs/2403.05038. I believe it is a great resource for anyone doing scientific computing with #rstats.

06.02.2025 13:34 β€” πŸ‘ 10    πŸ” 4    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
Developing with collapse

It's nice to see an increasing number of #rstats packages use {collapse}. A developer focused vignette was long planned and now it is here - with modest advice on writing efficient R package code in general and using {collapse} in particular: sebkrantz.github.io/collapse/art...

27.12.2024 17:10 β€” πŸ‘ 19    πŸ” 5    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0