ballast: Stress-Test a Pre-Specified Mixed Model for Repeated Measures

Refits one pre-specified mixed model for repeated measures (MMRM) under families of data and analytic perturbations (covariance structure, degrees-of-freedom method and variance estimator, covariate set, analysis population, alternative analysis data sets, leave-one-out deletions, crossed specification grids, re-randomisation tests, delta-adjusted and reference-based multiple imputation, and alternative estimators) and judges every refit against the pre-specified estimate, confidence interval and p-value. Classifies the result as robust, sensitive or fragile, with a separate flag for marginal significance, and estimates by simulation the probability that a planned design gives a significant and robust result. Fitting uses 'mmrm' (Sabanes Bove et al., 2024, <https://openpharma.github.io/mmrm/>) with 'SAS' 'PROC MIXED' conventions for the least-squares-mean contrast, Kenward-Roger adjustment and the corrected Akaike criterion. Reference-based multiple imputation follows Carpenter, Roger and Kenward (2013) <doi:10.1080/10543406.2013.834911> and was checked against 'rbmi' (Gower-Page, Noci and Wolbers, 2022) <doi:10.21105/joss.04251>.

Version:	0.6.1
Depends:	R (≥ 4.1.0)
Imports:	mmrm (≥ 0.3.0), stats, utils, parallel
Suggests:	ggplot2, emmeans, nlme, MASS, flextable, officer, plotly, htmlwidgets, htmltools, jsonlite, testthat (≥ 3.0.0), knitr, rmarkdown
Published:	2026-10-30
DOI:	10.32614/CRAN.package.ballast (may not be active yet)
Author:	Adam Sullivan [aut, cre, cph], Nathan Hogan [ctb] (validation of the SAS reference results), Capricor Therapeutics [fnd]
Maintainer:	Adam Sullivan <asullivan at capricor.com>
BugReports:	https://github.com/Sullivanstatistics/ballast/issues
License:	MIT + file LICENSE
URL:	https://github.com/Sullivanstatistics/ballast
NeedsCompilation:	no
Language:	en-GB
Citation:	ballast citation info
Materials:	README, NEWS
CRAN checks:	ballast results

Documentation:

Reference manual:	ballast.html , ballast.pdf
Vignettes:	Designing for a robust result (source, R code) Interpreting the verdict (source, R code) Missing data: reference-based and delta-adjusted imputation (source, R code) Quickstart: stress-testing a pre-specified MMRM (source, R code) For SAS users: reproducing PROC MIXED and PROC MI conventions (source, R code) Validation summary (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source:	ballast_0.6.1.tar.gz
Windows binaries:	r-devel: not available, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: not available
macOS binaries:	r-release (arm64): not available, r-oldrel (arm64): not available, r-release (x86_64): not available, r-oldrel (x86_64): not available

Linking:

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