Package scaffolding

[nikosbosse]

The Metrics R package doesn’t seem actively maintained and may present a risk to the long-term sustainability of the project. From what I can tell, we only use it for relatively straightforward operations so I wonder if it’s really worth depending on it. A potential strong argument for having such a dependency is if it provided a significant speed boost by using C/C++ or Rust, especially for operations used in loops. But Metrics uses pure R so provides limited value-add in our case.

Conversely, I would probably recommend depending on the MatrixStats package. It’s a well-established package by an active member of the R community. It simple, clearly-named, and more efficient (written in C) replacement for the various apply() calls throughout the codebase.

Originally posted by @Bisaloo in https://github.com/epiforecasts/scoringutils/pull/791#pullrequestreview-2003401135