<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE pkgmetadata SYSTEM "http://www.gentoo.org/dtd/metadata.dtd">
<pkgmetadata>
	<longdescription>
		Estimation of Group Means and SDs from Binned Count Data //
		Estimates group-level means and standard deviations from binned
		(coarsened) count data, where the within-bin scores are
		unobserved.  The package implements three methods that share a
		common output structure: bin_means() (a fast estimator that
		assumes within-district normality and uses pooled bin
		proportions to derive bin-conditional truncated-normal
		expectations), mle_hetop() (maximum likelihood for the
		heteroskedastic ordered probit model of Reardon, Shear,
		Castellano and Ho 2017 doi:10.3102/1076998616666279), and
		fh_hetop() (the Bayesian Fay-Herriot variant of Lockwood,
		Castellano and Shear 2018 doi:10.3102/1076998618795124).  The
		mle_hetop() and fh_hetop() functions are forked from the
		'HETOP' package by J. R. Lockwood ('CRAN', last released 2019).
		mle_hetop() has been modified to speed up the runtime via a
		vectorized inner loop and to remove two user-facing arguments
		(fixedcuts and svals) that some users found confusing;
		cutpoints and starting values are now derived internally from
		the data.
	</longdescription>
</pkgmetadata>
