Is it possible to add a progess bar to GAM model in mgcv?

Question

I am running a complex GAM model in the MGCV package in R on a big dataset and was wondering if it is possible to compute a progress bar to track how fast it is running rather than waiting with hope.

Would anyone know how to add a progress bar to a model in R?

Answer 1

No, it's not possible. You can turn on trace = TRUE in gam.control() which you pass to the control argument to gam etc.

ctrl <- gam.control(trace = TRUE)
m <- gam(y ~ s(x), data = df, method = 'REML', control = ctrl)

Which will at least show you the progress of fitting and some stages of fitting depending on which of gam() or bam() you are using.