Estimating monotonic rates from biological data using local linear regression

Accessing many fundamental questions in biology begins with empirical estimation of simple monotonic rates of underlying biological processes. Across a variety of disciplines, ranging from physiology to biogeochemistry, these rates are routinely estimated from non-linearand noisy timeseries data using linear regression and adhoc manual truncation of non- linearities. Here, we introduce the R package LoLinR, aflexible toolkit to implement local linear regression techniques to objectively and reproduciblyestimatemonotonic biological rates from non-linear time series data, and demonstrate possible applications using metabolic rate data. LoLinR provides methods to easily and reliably estimate monotonic rates from time series data in a way that is statistically robust, facilitates reproducible research and is applicable to a wide variety of research disciplines in the biological sciences.