LoginSign Up
← Back to all sparks
C

cIRT

ANALYTICS
Velocity0.0

Choice Item Response Theory

github.com/tmsalab/cirt ↗

A choice-based IRT model published once in 2019 and kept compiling ever since

item-response-theorypsychometricsrcpparmadillomaintenance-moder-package
◆Current state
cIRT implements Choice Item Response Theory, jointly modelling which item a respondent picks and how they perform on it — the setting where subjects choose between a harder and an easier question and the choice itself carries information. It comes out of the TMSA Lab, is built on Rcpp and RcppArmadillo, and has had one substantive release since reaching CRAN. Everything after early 2019 is build-system and toolchain upkeep.
◆Where it's heading
The package's whole functional history fits in a two-day window in January 2019, when the CRAN release and its immediate follow-ups were tagged in one batch, followed a day later by a release enabling C++11 and OpenMP and fixing the choice generation procedure. Since then the releases track other people's deprecations: Armadillo dropping conversions, RcppArmadillo requiring a different Makevars, R raising its floor. The 2025 release is entirely of that kind, down to swapping the README to Quarto.
◆Prediction
The dependency floors were just raised to current Rcpp and RcppArmadillo, so the next release is most likely the one after Armadillo deprecates something else.

◆Recent moves

  1. 10mo ago

    Armadillo deprecations cleared, build config modernised

    Raises dependency floors to R 4.3.0 and current Rcpp and RcppArmadillo, drops CXX11 from Makevars to avoid Armadillo build problems, and replaces a deprecated conv_to call with as_scalar. Toolchain maintenance three years after the previous release, with no change to the model.

    View source ↗
  2. 4y ago

    person() argument fix and dependency floor raise

    Corrects the handling of the middle argument in person() by using given instead, and raises the R, Rcpp and RcppArmadillo minimums. The same shape as the release three years later: one small fix carried by a version bump.

    View source ↗
  3. 6y ago

    pkgdown site added, CI moved to GitHub Actions

    Adds LazyData to DESCRIPTION, publishes a pkgdown documentation site and migrates CI from Travis to GitHub Actions. Infrastructure only, though the docs site is the package's most visible artefact from this period.

    View source ↗
  4. 7y ago

    OpenMP enabled and the choice generation bug fixed

    Turns on C++11 and OpenMP, hands native registration to Rcpp, and fixes defects in the choice generation procedure — the part of the package that produces the choice data the model is built around. The last release to change what the package computes.

    View source ↗
  5. 7y ago

    cIRT 1.0.0: Initial Package Released to CRAN

    The Choice IRT methodology arrives on CRAN. This tag carries the newest timestamp of the January 2019 batch despite being the oldest version, so the feed's ordering does not reflect the actual release sequence here.

    View source ↗
  6. 7y ago

    Choice matrix gains hard and easy question ids

    Adds hard_q_id and easy_q_id columns to the bundled choice matrix. A dataset change, tagged seconds apart from three sibling versions in a backfilled batch.

    View source ↗