
Release notes for hierarchicalDS  Sept 26, 2012
Paul Conn paul.conn@noaa.gov 

v2.0 Release

-Species misclassification models now implemented
-Removes dependency on ggplot2
-Input data are now required to be in data.frame form; "Levels" as an input is deprecated
-Resolves a few bugs when trying to analyze data from >1 species
-Resolves a few bugs when trying to analyze data when the # of observers varies between transects
-Number of spatial strata now defined by "Mapping" instead of "Adj" input
-Resolved a bug that led to incorrect calculations when there was greater than one transect in a spatial grid cell
-Resolved a bug with translation of MCMC output to a coda object when there is only one grid cell (i.e. for data pooled over space)
-Resolves issues with covariate updates when the latent # of groups in a transect equals 0
-Incorporates a greater # of options for point independence; in particular, full independence can be last bin or first bin,
 and linear change on log scale can be positive or negative (with options to fix the sign)
-Implemented posterior predictive loss criterion for model discrimination (sensu Gelfand and Ghosh 1998) in function "post_loss"
-Incorporates additional Control variable "iter.fix.N" which specifies the number of iterations to estimate parameters while
 keeping abundance fixed.  This can help stabilize estimation when data are sparse
-The prior distribution for habitat beta parameters is now assumed to be Normal(0,(tau_beta*X'X)^(-1)) where tau_beta is provided by the user
 This scaling helps mixing and provides structure on beta parameters; previous implementation had a bug that the prior sd could be specified
 for beta parameters but in effect an improper prior was always used during estimation.
