Changes in depmixS4 version 1.5-3

Minor changes
  o Made regression checks for constrained optimizer examples more robust
    across CRAN platforms without changing package behaviour.

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.5-2

Minor changes
  o Documentation updates to maintain CRAN compatibility

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.5-0

Major changes
  o  Changed interface of the posterior function to include an additional argument
     type, allowing returning of the global and local state sequence, smoothing
     and filtering probabilities, as well as the full output of the viterbi 
     function (which is what the posterior function used to the return, and still
     is the default for backwards compatibility).

Minor changes
  o Changed examples in the "fit" and "depmix" documentation to use the smoothing
    probabilities rather than the delta probabilities.
  o Rewritten documentation for the posterior method, explaining the differences
    between the "type" options.
  o Added documentation for the viterbi function


Changes in depmixS4 version 1.4-2

Minor changes

  o Changed rdirichlet to reliably give a vector of 1's when alpha has length 1. 
    This fixes issue with random.start in EM for nclasses = 1 (see 
    https://stackoverflow.com/q/56735420/13797727)

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.4-1

Major changes
  o Replaced errorprone calls using class(x)=="y", now using is(x,"y"). 

Minor changes

  o Added function multistart to fit models using multiple sets of random starting
  	values. 

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.4-0

Major changes

  o Added functionality for computing a finite differences Hessian of fitted 
    models, which is returned by default from the fit function. 
	
Minor changes

  o Multivariate normal distribution models now use ML estimates (instead of the 
    unbiased version that was hitherto used).
	
  o Fixed a bug in the simulate class where a depmix.fitted object used
  	to simulate data was cast to mix.sim object rather than the correct
	depmix.sim object.
	
  o Added function 'stationary' that computes the stationary distribution of 
    a transition probability matrix. 
	
Changes in depmixS4 version 1.3-5

  o GLM responses now allow missing values in covariates, as long as the
    response variable (dependent variable) is also missing at those positions

  o If the likelihood decreases on an interation in the EM algorithm, the 
    fitted model is returned with a warning, rather than producing an error 
    (requested by Arthur Bossavy).

  o Removed the meta-data from the depmixS4-package help page as that 
    tends to get out of sync with new releases (and adds little information).
  
  o Added documentation for makeMix (following a request by Ivan Jimenez; the
    function has not been tested extensively). 

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.3-4

  o Fixed a bug in glm.fit which produced an error for a poisson response
    when there were missing values. 
	
  o Added an example on ?fit to get posterior state sequences for new
    or 'out-of-sample' data. 

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.3-3
  
  o The underlying code for the forwardbackward function was changed from 
    extern 'C' in a c++ environment to plain C (the c++ definitions were 
    there for historical reasons but no longer necessary). 

  o Added support for fitting linear inequality constraints using solnp 
    optimization (thanks to Romann Weber for noticing this support was 
    missing). 

  o Added factor level names to summary of multinomial() models
    to ease interpretation. 
    
  o Fixed bug in EM with "hard" classification for mixture models (did not work
    with random starting values).
    
  o In EM with "hard" classification, when a component/state is empty
    (has no assignments), previous parameter values are now retained.

  o Improved error message when optimization method is wrongly specified 
    in fit function.

  o Fixed a bug in the summary method for fitted models; in some cases 
    parameters of the prior model were printed in the transition matrix; 
    thanks to Verena Schmittmann for catching this bug (which was 
    introduced in 1.3-0 along with compact argument in summary's of fitted 
    models). 

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.3-2

  o Removed partial matching argument in call to check.attributes for 
    compatibility with R release 3.1.0. 

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.3-1

Major changes

  o Fixed a bug in the fit function of (dep-)mix objects; upper and lower 
    bounds of general linear contraints were not passed to the optimization 
	routines when any of the bounds was zero; in that case, all bounds were 
	set to zero. Thanks to Vincent Miele for bringing this to my 
	attention. 

Minor changes

  o Added a reference to Giudici et al (2000) in the vignette in the 
	section on likelihood ratio testing which fits better with the 
	procedure that is implemented. Thanks to Jan Bulla for probing us 
	about the vignette text there. 	  

  o Added a conditional to set the log likelihood of a model to a value
	just above the starting value (i.e. the values before iterations start)
	when the logl functions returns Infinite (which may sometimes occur when
	parameters are set outside their boundaries).


Changes in depmixS4 version 1.3-0

Major changes

  o The EM algorithm has gained an extra argument 'classification',
	passed from the 'fit' function using argument 'emcontrol', to allow a
 	choice between maximising the regular (classification="soft", the
	default) or classification (classification="hard") likelihood. 
	WARNING: using the classification likelihood combined with random 
	starting values may easily lead to unstable results; use with 
	caution. 

  o Parameters are now given proper names, following the glm() scheme
  	(e.g. '(Intercept)', 'x1', et cetera); with this, the show and summary
	methods have changed considerably and now produce more compact and more
	readable output.  The summary method (for both fitted and unfitted
	models) now has an argument 'compact' (TRUE by default) that controls
	the presentation of the repsonse model parameters.  The prior and
	transition models are now presented more compactly when there are no
	covariates.
	
  o The fit function has gained two arguments: solnpcntrl and donlpcntrl 
    which can be used to fine tune optimization using packages Rsolnp and 
	Rdonlp2; the latter is not on CRAN, and the version that depmixS4 is 
	compatible with is from r-forge (note the licence from the package). 

  o The EM algorithm is now more memory efficient and hence faster, 
    most notably for large models and/or data; thanks to Robert McGehee
    for generously providing these code enhancements. 

Minor changes

  o Binomial models now treat factors in the same way as glm(); that is
    the first level of a factor is treated as a failure, and the remaining
    levels as successes.

  o Un-fitted models now also have a summary method, which is identical to 
    the show method for these models.  

  o Added function getmodel(object) to select submodels of a full mix or 
	depmix model, eg to use in deriving predictions, getting at parameter 
	values, et cetera. 

  o Small parameter values in multinomial response models and the initial
	probabilities and transition models (with identity link) are now set to
	zero to speed-up convergence.  Current threshold is 1e-6. 

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.2-2

  o Changed class assignment of depmix.fitted object using as(). 

  o Fixed a bug in the fit method of depmix models: linear inequality 
    constraints were not passed on to rsolnp (thanks to Peiming Wang for 
	bringing this to my attention). 

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.2-1

  o Fixed a bug in handling of missing values for mix models

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.2-0

Major changes
  
  o Missing values for responses are now allowed. Note that missing values 
	in covariates will cause errors. 
    
Changes in depmixS4 version 1.1-0
  
Major changes
  
  o The main loop computing the forward and backward variables for use in 
    the EM algorithm is now implemented in C. Depending on model specifics 
    this results in a 2-4 fold speed increase when fitting models.

  o The Changes for each release (in the NEWS file) is now split into two 
    sections: Major and Minor changes.

  o Added several examples on the ?responses page (Poisson change point
    model, similar model with a single multinomial response) and the 
    ?depmix page (model for S&P 500 returns; thanks to Chen Haibo for
    sending this). 

Minor changes
  
  o Corrected a typo in the vignette in Equation 1; the first occurrence 
    of S read S_t instead of S_1 (thanks to Peng Yu for reporting this).

  o Added a sensible error message when the data contains missings (depmixS4 
    can not handle missing data yet). 

  o Fixed a bug in the relative stopping criterion for EM (which resulted 
    in immediate indication of convergence for positive log likelihoods; 
    thanks to Chen Haibo for sending the S&P 500 example which brought out
    this problem).

  o Function forwardbackward now has a useC argument to determine whether 
    C code is used, the default, or not (the R code is mostly left in place
    for easy debugging). 
   
  o Added a fix for models without covariates/intercepts. In responseGLM 
    and responseMVN the function setpars now exits when length(value) == 0. 
    In setpars.depmix, a check is added whether npar > 0.

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.0-4

  o Added examples of the use of ntimes argument on ?depmix and ?fit 
    help pages using the ?speed data (which now has the full reference
    to the accompanying publication). 

  o Using nobs generic from stats/stats4 rather than defining them 
    anew (which gave clashes with other packages that did the same).

  o Fixed a bug in simulation of gaussian response model, which was 
    returning NaNs due to an error in assignment of the sd parameter
    (introduced in version x). Thanks to Jeffrey Arnold for reporting
	this (bug #1365). 

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.0-3

  o Using AIC/BIC/logLik generics from stats/stats4 rather than 
    defining them anew (which gave clashes with other packages that did 
    the same).

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.0-2

  o fixed a bug in simulation of binomial response model data (the response
    consists of the number of successes, and the number of failures; in 
    simulation, the number of failures was an exact copy of the number of
    successes). 

  o added a meaningful error message in the EM algorithm for lca/mixture 
    models in case the initial log likelihood is NA (thanks to Matthias
    Ihrke for pointing this out). 

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.0-1

  o minor changes in documentation to conform to R 2.12.0 standards. 

  o fixed a bug concerning random start values (the argument to specify
    this was not passed to the EM algorithm and hence was completely 
    ineffective ...). 

  o changed the emcontrol argument to the fit function; it now calls 
    a function em.control which returns the list of control parameters, which
    now also includes maxit, the max number of iterations of the EM algorithm. 
    This makes future additions to EM control parameters easier. 

  o random parameter initialization is now the default when using EM 
    to fit models. 
  
  o fixed a bug in multinomial models with n>1; the parameters are now 
    normalized such that they sum to unity (this bug was introduced in 
    version 0.9-0 in multinomial models with identity link). 

  o added an error message for multinomial response models with n>1 and 
    link='mlogit' as this case is not handled; n>1 multinomial can use the
    'identity' link function. 

Changes in depmixS4 version 1.0-0

  o added a vignette to the package and upped the version number 1.0-0 to 
    celebrate publication in the Journal of Statistical Software. 

Changes in depmixS4 version 0.9-1

  o fixed a bug in setting the lower and upper bounds for GLMresponse
    models (the number of bounds was wrong for models with covariates/
    predictors; these bounds are only used in constrained optimization in
    which case they produced an error immediately; in EM optimization these
    bounds are not used).

Changes in depmixS4 version 0.9-0

  o added optimization using Rsolnp, which can be invoked by using 
    method="rsolnp" in calling fit on (dep-)mix objects. Note that 
    this is meant for fitting models with additional constraints. 
    Method="rsolnp" is now the default when fitting constrained 
    models, method="donlp" is still supported. 

  o added documentation for control arguments that can be passed to 
    em algorithm, particularly for controlling the tolerance in 
    optimization.

  o added multinomial models with identity link for transition and prior 
    probabilities. These are now the default when no covariates are 
    present. 

  o added bounds and constraints for multinomial identity models such
    that these constraints are satisfied when fitting models with
    method="rsolnp" or "donlp".  Also, variance and sd parameters in
    gaussian and multivariate normal models are given bounds to prevent
    warnings and errors in optimization of such models using rsolnp or 
    donlp.

  o added option to generate starting values as part of the EM 
    algorithm. 

  o fixed a bug in multinomial response models with n>1; the response for
    these models can be specified as a k-column matrix with the number of
    observed responses for each category; the loglikelihood for these
    models in which there was more than 1 observation per row was
    incorrect; note that such models may lead to some numerical
    instabilities when n is large.

Changes in depmixS4 version 0.3-0
  
  o added multinomial response function with identity link (no covariates
    allowed in such a model); useful when (many) boundary values occur; 
    currently no constraints are used for such models, and hence only EM
    can be used for optimization, or alternatively, if and when Rdonlp2
    is used, sum constraints need to be added when fitting the model.
    See ?GLMresponse for details. 

  o added an example of how to specify a model with multivariate normal
    responses (and fixed a bug in MVNresponse that prevented such models
    from being specified in the first place). See ?makeDepmix for an 
    example. 

Changes in depmixS4 version 0.2-2

  o fixed a warning produced when specifying conrows.upper and .lower in
    the fit function

  o added error message in case the initial log likelihood is infeasible

  o fixed a bug in the fit function for multinomial response models with 
    covariates (thanks to Gilles Dutilh for spotting this)

Changes in depmixS4 version 0.2-1

  o fixed a bug in the Viterbi algorithm used to compute posterior states
    (this bug was introduced in version 0.2-0)
  
  o restructured test files somewhat

  o fixed a bug in the use of the conrows argument in the fit function (a 
    missing drop=FALSE statement)

  o updated help files for mix classes

  o fixed a bug in setting the starting values of regression coefficients in 
    prior and transInit models with covariates (thanks to Verena Schmittmann 
    for reporting this)

  o added newx argument to predict function of transInit objects, to be used
    for predicting probabilities depending on covariates (useful in eg plotting
    transition probabilities as function of a covariate)

  o added example of the use of conrows argument in fitting functions and other 
    minor updates in documentation
  
Changes in depmixS4 version 0.2-0

  o restructured R and Rd (help) files; added depmixS4 help with a short
    overview of the package and links to appropriate help files
  
  o added function 'simulate' to generate new data from a (fitted) model
  
  o added function 'forwardbackward' to access the forward and backward 
    variables as well as the smoothed transition and state variables
  
  o added new glm distributions: gamma, poisson
  
  o added multivariate normal distribution
  
  o freepars now works correctly on both depmix and depmix.fitted objects
  
  o added function 'nlin' to compute the number of linear constraints in 
    a fitted model object

  o added mix class for mixture and latent class models; the depmix class 
    extends this mix class and adds a transition model to it
  
  o added help file for makeDepmix to provide full control in specifying 
    models
  
  o minor changes to make depmixS4 compatible with R 2.7.1
  

Changes in depmixS4 version 0.1-1

  o adjusted for R 2.7.0

First version released on CRAN: 0.1-0
