Analysis and simulation of plant disease progress curves in R: introducing the epifitter package

Phytopathology Research

Table 2 Comparative table for the functionalities available in the epifitter, EPIDMODEL (Nutter and Parker 1997), and the spreadsheet developed by Bowen (2015)

Functionalities	Epimodel	Spreadsheet	Epifitter
Datasets
Accompanying datasets	Yes	No	No
Handling of single epidemics	Yes	No	Yes
Handling of multiple epidemics	Yes	No	Yes
Models fitting
Linear	Yes	No	No
Exponential	Yes	No	Yes
Monomolecular	Yes	No	Yes
Logistic	Yes	No	Yes
Gompertz	Yes	No	Yes
Richards	No	No	No
Estimate maximum asymptote	No	No	Yes
Simulation
Disease progress curves	No	Yes	Yes
Random noise	No	No	Yes
Fitting method
Linear regression	Yes	No	Yes
Non-linear regression	No	No	Yes
Model summary
Goodness of fit	Yes	No	Yes
Model ranking	No	No	Yes
Visualization
Diagnostic (error plots)	Yes	No	No
Fitted values	Yes	No	Yes
Plot customization	No	Yes	Yes
Epidemic comparison
Area under curve or stairs	No	No	Yes