Version 0.11.0 of NIMBLE released

We’ve released the newest version of NIMBLE on CRAN and on our website. NIMBLE is a system for building and sharing analysis methods for statistical models, especially for hierarchical models and computationally-intensive methods (such as MCMC and SMC).

Version 0.11.0 provides a variety of new functionality, improved error trapping, and bug fixes, including:

• added the posterior_predictive_branch MCMC sampler, which samples jointly from the predictive distribution of networks of entirely non-data nodes, to improve MCMC mixing,
• added a model method to find parent nodes, called getParents(), analogous to getDependencies(),
• improved efficiency of conjugate samplers,
• allowed use of the elliptical slice sampler for univariate nodes, which can be useful for posteriors with multiple modes,
• allowed model definition using if-then-else without an else clause, and
• fixed a bug giving incorrect node names and potentially affecting algorithm behavior for models with more than 100,000 elements in a vector node or any dimension of a multi-dimensional node.

Please see the release notes on our website for more details.