[pomp-announce] pomp version 0.45-8 released

[Aaron King]

Dear pomp users,

Version 0.45-8 has been uploaded to CRAN and should be available on mirrors soon.  This release has many new features and lots of bugfixes.  Some highlights:

* bug fix in 'pmcmc': Metropolis-Hastings ratio was incorrect except for flat priors!

* a fix so that 'pompBuilder' will find 'pomp.h' header file on Windows machines.  Thanks to Dave Hayman for finding the problem.

* changes in the way 'reulermultinom', 'deulermultinom', 'dot_product' are exported to other packages.  Rather than just being exported as linkables, these are now also defined as static inline functions in the 'pomp.h' header.

* 'profileDesign' can now handle variables of mixed type.

* New 'mif2' option for 'mif'.

* The default behavior for 'mif' and 'pfilter' with respect to filtering failures has been changed.  Before, the default behavior has been to stop with an error on the first filtering failure ('max.fail=0').  Now, the default is 'max.fail=Inf', i.e., an error is never triggered.

* The implementation of MIF cooling schedules has been changed to make it more general. The cooling schedule is now specified by a 'type' and a 'fraction'.  Currently, supported 'cooling.type's include 'geometric' (the old behavior) and 'hyperbolic', i.e., a 1/(1+n) schedule.  The 'cooling.fraction' argument specifies the cooling at 50 iterations.  That is, if s is the intensity of the random-walk perturbation to parameters at the first iteration ('rw.sd'), then the intensity at iteration 50 is s*cooling.fraction.

* all data()-loadable pomp objects have been removed.  To load the prebuilt example pomp objects from previous versions, use the new 'pompExample' function.  E.g., instead of 'data(euler.sir)', do 'pompExample("euler.sir")'.

For a complete view of the changes, have a look at the NEWS file and/or the source code manager on R-Forge.

As always, I welcome comments, criticisms, bug reports, and feature requests.

Happy pomping!

Aaron

-- 
Aaron A. King, Ph.D.
Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Mathematics
Center for the Study of Complex Systems
University of Michigan
GPG Public Key: 0x15780975