Software and datasets to support 'Modern Applied Statistics with S',
fourth edition, by W. N. Venables and B. D. Ripley.
Springer, 2002, ISBN 0-387-95457-0.

This file documents software changes since the third edition.


- eqscplot has new arguments ratio and uin.
- stepAIC will not drop strata terms in coxph or survreg models.
- profile.glm will report inadequate supplied glm fits, not just fail.
- new method confint.lm.
- fractions/rational allow missing values.
- mvrnorm has an 'empirical' argument.
- predict.lda and predict.qda try harder to avoid exponential underflow.

- new function fitdistr for ML estimation of univariate distributions.
- new function glmmPQL to use lme to fit GLMMs by PQL
- truehist allows rule for nbins to be specified as a character string.
- parcoord function.
- new datasets bacteria, epil, nlschools, SP500
- polr allows control argment for optim, reports lack of convergence.
- stepAIC works again if formula has an offset (R had changed).
- biplot.correspondence now shows the origin as a cross.
- polr was not preserving contrasts to put in the fit object.
- vcov methods for lme, gls, coxph and survReg.
- Added 'tol' argument to isoMDS.
- stepAIC now allow 'direction=both' starting from a full model.
- glm.nb allows R-style 'start' argument.
- truehist passes ... on to both plot.default() and rect().
- isoMDS now uses the C interface to optim.
- addterm, dropterm, stepAIC now work with lme and gls fits.
- huber checks for MAD equal to zero.
- glmmPQL now loads nlme if not already loaded.
- glmmPQL handles list 'random' arguments (7.0-11).
- The MASS datasets no longer require data(foo) to load them. (7.0-11)
- mvrnorm uses eigen(EISPACK=TRUE) for back-compatibility (7.0-11, R 1.7.0)
- print.summary.polr could lose dimnames for 1 coefficient.
- remove heart as survival in R now has it.
- confint.{lm,glm} didn't handle specifying parm in all cases.
- confint and confint.lm have been migrated to base in R.
- addterm.default, dropterm.default and stepAIC work better inside functions.
- glm.nb now sets AIC in the object, and has a logLik() method.
- truehist now accepts a 'ylab' argument.
- negative.binomial and neg.bin no longer generate objects with
  package:MASS in their environment.
- stepAIC now drops (if allowed) 0-df terms sequentially from the right.
- lda(CV=TRUE) now works for rank-deficient fits.
- predict methods for lda, polr now check newdata types.
- model.frame.lda/polr now look for the environment of the original formula.
- polr has a new `model' argument defaulting to TRUE.
- fitdistr supports the trivial case of a Normal distribution.
- sammon and isoMDS now allow missing values in the dissimilarity matrix, and
  isoMDS allows Minkowski distances in the configuration space.
- cov.trob works better if wts are supplied, and may converge a little faster 
  in any case.
- The ch11.R script now uses mclust not mclust1998.
- The default xlab for boxcox() is now greek lambda.
- glmmPQL now handles offset terms.
- add predict.rlm method to correct predict.lm in the case se.fit=TRUE.
- weighted rlm fits are handled better, and default to "inv.var".
- logtrans works without specifying 'data'.
- predict() method for glmmPQL.
- polr() has an option for probit or proportional hazard fits.
- neg.bin() and negative.binomial() had an error in the aic() formula.
- The ch05.R script now includes the code for Figure 5.8.
- Datasets austres, fdeaths, lh, mdeaths, nottem and rock 
  are now visible in the 'datasets' package of R 2.0.0 and so have 
  been removed here.
- Script ch07.R now gives details using the gam() function in package gam as
  well as that in package mgcv.
- rlm's fitted component is now always unweighted.
- theta.{md,ml,mm} now have one help file with examples.
- polr() has a new method "cauchit" suggested by Roger Koenker.
  (Requires R >= 2.1.0)
- polr() now works with transformed intercepts, and usually converges
  better (contributed by David Firth).
- polr() handles a rank-deficient model matrix.
- polr() now returns the method used, and uses it for predictions.
- anova() method for polr (contributed by John Fox).
- predict.glmmPQL was not using the na.action in the object as intended.
- The default methods for addterm and dropterm and anova.polr now check
  for changes in the number of cases in use caused e.g. by na.action=na.omit.
- Added vcov() method for rlm fits.
- eqscplot() accepts reversed values for xlim and ylim.
- Script ch10.R uses se.contrast to calculate se's missing from model.tables.
- profile() and confint() methods for polr().
- glm.convert() was not setting the `offset' component that R's glm objects 
  have.
- sammon() now checks for duplicates in the initial configuration.
- isoMDS() and sammon() workaround dropping of names.dist in 2.1.0
