Version 0.7.0 of NIMBLE released

release

announcement

Author

NIMBLE Development Team

Published

February 5, 2019

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 0.7.0 provides a variety of new features, as well as various bug fixes.

New features include:

greatly improved efficiency of sampling for Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) mixture models that use the dCRP (Chinese Restaurant process) distribution;
addition of the double exponential (Laplace) distribution for use in models and nimbleFunctions;
a new RW_wishart MCMC sampler, for sampling non-conjugate Wishart and inverse-Wishart nodes;
handling of the normal-inverse gamma conjugacy for BNP mixture models using the dCRP distribution;
enhanced functionality of the getSamplesDPmeasure function for posterior sampling from BNP random measures with Dirichlet process priors.
handling of five-dimensional arrays in models;
enhanced warning messages; and
an HTML version of the NIMBLE manual.

Please see the NEWS file in the installed package for more details.