niche

Overview

niche is the primary entry point for the niche R universe, which supports reproducible, audit-ready consumer psychology research. This package provides a minimal, stable interface for defining, building, and executing research workflows.

The niche universe is structured as follows:

• niche (this package): User-facing entry point with three core functions
• nicheCore: Defines structural contracts (classes, validators, and determinism utilities)
• vision: Handles specification parsing and recipe building
• Domain packages (e.g., fury, forge, shuri, strange, banner): Extend functionality with data processing, modeling, scoring, and reporting capabilities (not required for minimal workflow)

Installation

You can install the development version of niche from GitHub:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("phdemotions/niche")

Minimal Example

This example demonstrates the complete minimal workflow without requiring external data:

library(niche)

# Create a temporary spec file
tmp <- tempfile(fileext = ".yml")
vision::write_spec_template(tmp)

# Step 1: Read the specification
spec <- niche_spec(tmp)

# Step 2: Build the recipe
recipe <- niche_build(spec)

# Step 3: Execute the workflow
result <- niche_run(recipe)

# Inspect the result
print(result)

The niche_run() function performs minimal execution: it validates the recipe, creates output directories, writes the recipe JSON artifact, and returns a niche_result object. Data processing, modeling, and reporting are delegated to domain-specific packages.

Core Functions

• niche_spec(path): Read and validate a YAML specification file
• niche_build(spec): Build an execution recipe from a specification
• niche_run(recipe): Execute the minimal workflow and return results

License

MIT License. Copyright (c) 2026 Josh Gonzales.