NEWS

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maxLik 1.5-0

• maxLik methods for 'tidy' and 'glance' generics (by David Hugh-Jones)
• maxLik method for 'confint' (by Luca Scrucca)
• most tests moved to 'tinytest' package
• fixed an issue with negative reltol values

maxLik 1.4-8 (2021-03-22)

• added two vignettes: "Getting started with maximum likelihood and maxLik" and "maximum likelihood estimation with maxLik"

maxLik 1.4-6 (2020-11-24)

• changed the name of internal function head... to headDots to avoid issues with perforce VCS
• maxNR and friends now correctly return code 8 if reltol stopping condition invoked
• documentation fixes and clean-ups

maxLik 1.4-4 (2020-09-04)

• fixed another issue with CRAN tests on ATLAS

maxLik 1.4-2

• fixed CRAN test issues

maxLik 1.4-0 (2020-07-31)

• includes stochastic gradient ascent and Adam optimizer

maxLik 1.3-10

• fixed an issue where maxControl() silently ignored a number of parameters
• print.summary.maxim accepts parameters max.rows and max.cols, and only prints this many columns/rows of output matrices

maxLik 1.3-8 (2020-01-10)

• better handling of matrix class
• better handling of matrix class

maxLik 1.3-6 (2019-05-19)

• 'maxim' objects now support 'maxValue' and 'gradient' methods.
• tests cleaned and give fewer notes on check

maxLik 1.3-4 (2015-11-09)

• If Hessian is not negative definite in maxNRCompute, the program now attempts to correct this repeatedly, but not infinite number of times. If Marquardt selected, it uses Marquardt lambda and it's update method.
• Fixed an issue where summary.maxLik did not use 'eigentol' option for displaying standard errors

maxLik 1.3-2 (2015-10-29)

• Corrected a bug that did not permit maxLik to pass additional arguments to the likelihood function

maxLik 1.3-0 (2015-10-25)

• maxNR & friends now support argument 'qac' (quadratic approximation correction) option that allows to choose the behavior if the next guess performs worse than the previous one. This includes the original step halving while keeping direction, and now also Marquardt's (1963) shift toward the steepest gradient.
• all max** functions now take control options in the form as 'control=list(...)', analogously as 'optim'. The former method of directly supplying options is preserved for compatibility reasons.
• sumt, and stdEr method for 'maxLik' are now in namespace
• the preferred way to specify the amount of debugging information is now 'printLevel', not 'print.level'.

maxLik 1.2-4 (2014-12-31)

• Equality constraints (SUMT) checks conformity of the matrices
• coef.maxim() is now exported
• added argument "digits" to print.summary.maxLik()
• added argument "digits" to condiNumber.default()
• further arguments to condiNumber.maxLik() are now passed to condiNumber.default() rather than to hessian()

maxLik 1.2-0 (2013-10-22)

• Inequality constraints now support multiple constraints (B may be a vector).
• Fixed a bug in documentation, inequality constraint requires A %*% theta + B > 0, not >= 0 as stated earlier.
• function sumKeepAttr() is imported from the miscTools package now (before maxLik() could not be used by another package when this package imported (and not depended on) the maxLik package) (bug reported and solution provided by Martin Becker)

maxLik 1.1-8 (2013-09-18)

• fixed bug that could occur in the Newton-Raphson algorithm if the log-likelihood function returns a vector with observation-specific values or if there are NAs in the function values, gradients, or Hessian

maxLik 1.1-4 (2013-09-16)

• the package code is byte-compiled
• if the log-likelihood function contains NA, the gradient is not calculated; if components of the gradient contain NA, the Hessian is not calculated
• slightly improved documentation
• improved warning messages and error messages when doing constrained optimisation
• added citation information
• added start-up message

maxLik 1.1-2 (2012-03-05)

• BHHH only considers free parameters when analysing the size of gradient
• numericGradient and numericHessian check for the length of vector function

maxLik 1.1-0 (2012-01-12)

• Conjugate-gradient (CG) optimization method included.
• it is guaranteed now that the variance covariance matrix returned by the vcov() method is always symmetric.
• summary.maxLik is guaranteed to use maxLik specific methods, even if corresponding methods for derived classes have higher priority.

maxLik 1.0-2 (2011-10-17)

This is mainly bugfix release

• maxBFGSR works with fixed parameters.
• maxBFGS and other optim-based routines work with both fixed parameters and inequality constraints.
• constrOptim2 removed from API. Names of it's formal arguments are changed.

maxLik 1.0-0 (2010-10-15)

• moved the generic function stdEr() including a default method and a method for objects of class "lm" to the "miscTools" package (hence, this package now depends on the version 0.6-8 of the "miscTools" package that includes stdEr()
• if argument print.level is 0 (the default) and some parameters are automatically fixed during the estimation, because the returned log-likelihood value has attributes "constPar" and "newVal", the adjusted "starting values" are no longer printed.

maxLik 0.8-0 (2010-08-12)

• fixed bug that occured in maxBFGS(), mxNM(), and maxSANN if the model had only one parameter and the function specified by argument "grad" returned a vector with the analytical gradients at each observation
• maxNR() now performs correctly with argument "iterlim" set to 0
• maxNR, maxBHHH(), maxBFGS(), maxNM(), and maxSANN() now use attributes "gradient" and "hessian" of the object returned by the log-likelihood function; if supplied, these are used instead of arguments "grad" and "hess"
• added function maxBFGSR() that implements the BFGS algorithm (in R); this function was originally developed by Yves Croissant and placed in the "mlogit" package
• maxNR() now has an argument "bhhhHessian" (defaults to FALSE): if this argument is TRUE, the Hessian is approximated by the BHHH method (using information equality), i.e. the BHHH optimization algorithm is used
• maxLik() now has an argument 'finalHessian'; if it is TRUE, the final Hessian is returned; if it is the character string "BHHH", the BHHH approximation of the Hessian matrix (using information equality) with attribute "type" set to "BHHH" is returned
• maxNR(), maxBHHH(), maxBFGS(), maxNM(), and maxSANN() now additionally return a component "gradientObs" that is the matrix of gradients evaluated at each observation if argument "grad" returns a matrix or argument "grad" is not specified and argument "fn" returns a vector
• the definitions of the generic functions nObs() and nParam() have been moved to the "miscTools" package
• added methods bread() and estfun() for objects of class "maxLik" (see documentation of the generic functions bread() and estfun() defined in package "sandwich")
• replaced argument "activePar" of numericGradient(), numericHessian(), and numericNHessian() by argument "fixed" to be consistent with maxLik(), maxNR(), and the other maxXXX() functions
• maxNR(), maxBHHH(), maxBFGSYC(), maxBFGS(), maxNM(), maxSANN(), and summary.maxLik() now return component "fixed" instead of component "activePar"

maxLik 0.7-2 (2010-05-05)

• corrected negative definiteness correction of Hessian in maxNR() which led to infinite loops
• changed stopping condition in sumt(): instead of checking whether estimates are stimilar, we check for penalty being low now

maxLik 0.7-0 (2010-04-17)

• Holding parameters fixed in maxNR() (and hence, also in maxBHHH()) should now be done by the new (optional) argument "fixed", because it is convenient to use than the "old" argument "activePar" in many situations. However, the "old" argument "activePar" is kept for backward-compatibility.
• added (optional) argument "fixed" to functions maxBFGS(), maxNM(), and maxSANN(), which can be used for holding parameters fixed at their starting values
• added function constrOptim2(), which is a modified copy of constrOptim() from the "stats" package, but which includes a bug fix
• added optional argument "cand" to function maxSANN(), which can be used to specify a function for generating a new candidate point (passed to argument "gr" of optim())
• added argument "random.seed" to maxSANN() to ensure replicability
• several mainly smaller improvements in ML estimations with linear equality and inequality constraints (via sumt() and constrOptim2(), respectively)
• several internal changes that make the code easier to maintain

maxLik 0.6-0 (2009-10-16)

• maxLik() can perform maximum likelihood estimations under linear equality and inequality constraints on the parameters now (see documentation of the new argument "constraints"). Please note that estimations under constraints are experimental and have not been thoroughly tested yet.
• a new method "stdEr" to extract standard errors of the estimates has been introduced
• added a "coef" method for objects of class "summary.maxLik" that extracts the matrix of the estimates, standard errors, t-values, and P-values
• some minor bugs have been fixed
• we did some general polishing of the returned object and under the hood

maxLik 0.5-12 (2009-07-18)

• please take a look at the log messages of the SVN repository on R-Forge