We have developed a collection of open source R packages implementing our methods:

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• dembase - general-purpose tools for demographic analysis

• demest - Bayesian statistical methods for demography

• demlife - creating and working with life tables

• demdata - general-purpose example datasets for demography

• bdefdata - example datasets for the applications in Bayesian demographic estimation and forecasting.

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We have not yet put the packages on the standard R repository CRAN. For the time being, you will need to install them directly from GitHub. To do this, you will need to install the R package devtools from CRAN. Then run the following code:

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library(devtools)

install_github("statisticsnz/dembase")

install_github("statisticsnz/demest")

install_github("statisticsnz/demlife")

install_github("statisticsnz/demdata)

install_github("johnrbryant/bdefdata")

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The reason we have not yet put the packages on CRAN is that we are still modifying the interface and adding functionality.

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Much of the development of these packages was carried out by John Bryant while he was an employee of Stats NZ. We are grateful to Stats NZ for their support.