It’s been a quiet week here at Lake Woebegone…wait, that’s not right. While outward signs may have been quiet, there are many goings on up in here the data-fueled republic of Cascadia. Not the least of which is the release of Evaluator V0.2.3 to CRAN.

This version contains a large number of changes and improvements since the v0.1.x series. Apart from a whole new test infrastructure and many many code improvements as a result of said testing, this is the official release of the Multi-Level Analysis (MLA) functionality that has been under development for the past several months.

What is MLA, you ask? Briefly, MLA gives the user the ability to create their own risk models at any level of the OpenFAIR taxonomy. This allows scenarios to be modeled at the high level of Loss Magnitude and Loss Event Frequency, at the lower levels of Threat Contact and Probability of Action, and all the levels in between. A more through dive into creating these alternative models will be a focus for future posts.

As nifty as this new flexibility may be, there’s an even bigger improvement for casual Evaluator users. The out of the box experience for Evaluator, apart from the new evaluator.severski.net website, includes a Minimum Viable Analysis (MVA) workflow. The MVA workflow allows an analyst to install Evaluator and perform a strategic risk assessment with as little as three commands in R! MVA is intended for new R users, allowing them to spend more time getting data and deciding on their risk structure and less time getting familiar with R. MVA and it’s beta-sibling, the Evaluator Docker image, are also the subjects of forthcoming posts.