Dear R Community, I am happy to introduce the latest version 1.3-0 of the 'dclone' R package. The package provides low level functions for implementing maximum likelihood estimating procedures for complex models using data cloning and Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo methods with support for JAGS, WinBUGS and OpenBUGS. Data cloning is a global optimization approach and a variant of simulated annealing which exploits Bayesian MCMC tools to get maximum likelihood point estimates and corresponding standard errors (see Lele et al. 2007, Ecology Letters, 10:551-563). The implementation used in the 'dclone' package is described in the recent paper: Solymos, P. 2010. dclone: Data Cloning in R. The R Journal, 2(2):29-37. URL: http://journal.r-project.org/archive/2010-2/RJournal_2010-2_Solymos.pdf The current release of 'dclone' supports parallel computations via the 'snow' package. Have fun, Peter Peter Solymos Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute and Boreal Avian Modelling project Department of Biological Sciences CW 405, Biological Sciences Bldg University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E9, Canada Phone: 780.492.8534 Fax: 780.492.7635 email <- paste("solymos", "ualberta.ca", sep = "@") http://www.abmi.ca http://www.borealbirds.ca http://sites.google.com/site/psolymos -- Main functions in the 'dclone' package include: * dclone, dcdim: cloning R objects in various ways. * jags.fit, bugs.fit: conveniently fit BUGS models. (jags.parfit fits chains on parallel workers for JAGS.) * dc.fit: iterative model fitting by the data cloning algorithm. (dc.parfit is the parallelized version.) * dctable, dcdiag: helps evaluating data cloning convergence by descriptive statistics and diagnostic tools. (These are based on e.g. chisq.diag and lambdamax.diag.) * coef.mcmc.list, confint.mcmc.list.dc, dcsd.mcmc.list, quantile.mcmc.list, vcov.mcmc.list.dc, mcmcapply: convenient functions for mcmc.list objects. * write.jags.model, clean.jags.model, custommodel: convenient functions for handling BUGS models. _______________________________________________ R-packages mailing list R-packages at r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-packages