Fitting the Cusp Catastrophe in R: A cusp Package Primer

Of the seven elementary catastrophes in catastrophe theory, the âÂÂcuspâ model is the most widely applied. Most applications are however qualitative. Quantitative techniques for catastrophe modeling have been developed, but so far the limited availability of flexible software has hindered quantitative assessment. We present a package that implements and extends the method of Cobb (Cobb and Watson'80; Cobb, Koppstein, and Chen'83), and makes it easy to quantitatively fit and compare different cusp catastrophe models in a statistically principled way. After a short introduction to the cusp catastrophe, we demonstrate the package with two instructive examples.