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Multivoxel Pattern Analysis in R

This package is under development.

Introduction

rMVPA is an R library for multivariate pattern analysis of neuroimaging data. The goal of this library is to make MVPA analyses easy. It can be used both programmatically from within R or using a command line interface. rMVPA provides a lightweight model registry and efficient resampling methods for machine learning. What rMVPA provides is the infrastructure for conducting machine learning analyses on neuroimaging data.

Documentation and vignettes: https://bbuchsbaum.github.io/rMVPA/

API lifecycle

The supported public workflow/API surface is now intentionally smaller and explicit. Use rmvpa_api_lifecycle() to inspect lifecycle tiers and rmvpa_stable_api() to list the stable entry points intended for scripts, extensions, and downstream packages.

Installation

Using devtools

To install rMVPA from within R, use the devtools function install_github. You will need the development version of neuroim2 as well.

From within R:

library(devtools)
install_github("bbuchsbaum/neuroim2")
install_github("bbuchsbaum/rMVPA")

Using git from the command line 

git clone git@github.com:bbuchsbaum/rMVPA.git
R CMD install rMVPA

Command line scripts

rMVPA now ships packaged CLI wrappers with native command names:

  • rmvpa-searchlight
  • rmvpa-regional

Install the package:

pak::pak("bbuchsbaum/rMVPA")

Then copy the wrappers into a directory on your PATH:

rMVPA::install_cli("~/.local/bin", overwrite = TRUE)

If needed, add that directory to PATH:

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

On macOS/Linux, you can then run:

rmvpa-searchlight --help
rmvpa-regional --help
rmvpa-searchlight --version

The unified CLI vignette is vignette("CommandLine"). The legacy source-tree entrypoints remain available as compatibility shims, but the packaged commands above are the supported interface.

Citation

If you use rMVPA in your research, please cite:

Buchsbaum, B. (2026). rMVPA: Multivoxel Pattern Analysis in R. R package version 0.1.2. https://github.com/bbuchsbaum/rMVPA