mda 0.1-4 is on CRAN Many thanks to Friedrich Leisch, Kurt Hornik and Brian Ripley for their early work in porting the mda package into R, and to Kurt for maintaining the package. I have "taken back" mda and will maintain it from now on. The package fits flexible, penalized and mixture discriminant models. For a brief introduction, see Sections 12.4-7 of "Elements of Statistical Learning" (first or second edition). This new version has documentation for the plot method, and has improved functionality for the regression method "gen.ridge". The "laplacian" penalty works and is documented, for implementing penalized discriminant analysis via the function fda(). The mars function has not changed, but users are encouraged to use the "earth" package of Stephen Milborrow, which fits "MARS" models; in particular, earth works as a regression method for fda() and mda(). Trevor Hastie