paramGUI
A Shiny-based R package for teaching parameter estimation examples inspired by time-resolved spectroscopy.
About paramGUI
paramGUI is an R package that provides an interactive browser-based interface for teaching parameter estimation in the context of global and target analysis. Built with the Shiny web-app framework and using TIMP as its computational backend, it lets students explore kinetic models, adjust parameters, run fits, and inspect results — all without writing R code.
Use cases
- Teaching courses on time-resolved spectroscopy analysis
- Demonstrating the effect of initial parameter guesses on convergence
- Introducing students to global and target analysis concepts interactively
Installation
paramGUI is available on CRAN. From an R console:
install.packages("paramGUI")History
The first version of paramGUI was created by Katharine Mullen and Ivo van Stokkum in 2008 for internal use at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where it was used for teaching with a Tcl/Tk-based GUI. In 2016 Joris Snellenburg rebuilt the frontend as a Shiny web app and released it to CRAN as version 2.0. The current release is v2.2.0 (December 2022).
Python successor
An early proof-of-concept to re-create paramGUI-style teaching widgets on top of pyglotaran is available as PyParamGUI.