R package numOSL: numeric routines for optically stimulated luminescence dating

Abstract

In luminescence dating, there are various software packages that can be used to do data analysis, such as Analyst, Java RadialPlotter, SigmaplotTM and so on. There is also an open source R package Luminescence, which has the capacity to tackle not only lots of basic statistical analysis but also provide more advanced data treatment. In this article, we present another R package, numOSL, the aim of which is neither to present a comprehensive numeric tool for luminescence dating just as the R package Luminescence did, nor to cover all numeric topics regarding luminescence dating. We focus only on the most frequently encountered numeric problems concerning luminescence dating, including equivalent dose calculation and error estimation, decay signal decomposition, fast-component equivalent dose calculation, and statistical age model optimization. Almost all our code is written in Fortran and is linked to R using an interface in order to improve algorithms, generality and flexibility. This makes it faster and perhaps more powerful when comparing to other numeric software.