SUMMER - changes

Version 2.0.0

• Major updates to function argument naming to improve consistency. Most of the arguments are backward compatible.
• New set of unit tests.
• New vignette on specifying cluster-level model for mortality estimation.
• Improvements to existing functions.

Version 1.4.0

• New major functions for population and prevalence simulation based on population frame and population density information, along with methods for aggregating pixel level prevalences and populations to the areal level.

Version 1.3.0

• New SAE functions and vignette.

Version 1.2.1

• smoothSurvey now can return posterior draws.
• More flexible strata effect specification in smoothCluster.
• Discrete cut option for mapPlot
• Internal changes to work with the latest INLA version 21.11.22.

Version 1.2.0 (2021-07-01)

• Major expansion for smoothSurvey to implement popular SAE methods. Syntax change to the function.
• Allows smoothDirect and smoothCluster to fit space-only models.
• smoothSurvey, smoothDirect, and smoothCluster now returns S3 classed objects.
• Bug fixes.

Version 1.1.0 (2021-01-31)

• New features:
  • Allows stratum-specific time trends to be shared in cluster-level models.
  • Allows age truncated to full years to be adjusted with the age.truncate variable in getBirths function. This corrects the person-month calculation for DHS surveys where the age in months are reported in only full years for children above 24 months old.
• Major bug fix: the person-months records produced by getBirths function contained an error in the previous versions, leading to incorrect death counts and exposure months. In addition, when age bands are specified to be different from the default, the age variable of the output could be wrong. These bugs are now fixed in the latest version.
  
• Other bug fixes:
  • Fix incorrectly calculated time main effect in getDiag function.
  • Fix bug when data contain rows with incorrectly labeled time periods.
  • Fix but when year.cut argument is of length 2 in getBirths function.

Version 1.0.0 (2020-07-01)

• Major updates to functions.
  • fitGeneric is now smoothSurvey
  • fitINLA is now smoothDirect
  • fitINLA2 is now smoothCluster
  • More extensions in both smoothed direct and cluster level models.
  • Major changes to how temporal models are specified with time.model and st.time.model.
  • More interpretable parameterization of slope and random slopes.
  • More visualization options.
  • Note: Previous function name and argument syntax remain to work as before, but may not receive high priority in maintenance in the future.
    
• Many minor improvements in functions.
  • Better model summary message.
  • Removed unnecessary function arguments, e.g., geo in various functions.
  • Removed the requirement to repeated specifying Amat, year_label and year_range. Now they are only required in the model fitting stage.
• New vignettes.

Version 0.3.1 (2019-10-23)

• Fixed minor typo that lower and upper bounds switched after applying aggregateSurvey().
• Add option to remove person-month records if last time period contain only k years of data in getBirth().
• Improved mapPlot().

Version 0.3.0 (2019-10-01)

• Version 0.3.0 contains some major updates from the previous versions.
• The following functions have been renamed. Most of the function arguments remain the same:
  • countrySummary is now getDirect
  • cuontrySummary_mult is now getDirectList
  • fitspace is now fitGeneric
  • projINLA is now getSmooth
    
• Major new functions:
  • fitINLA2: implements new smoothing methods based on binomial models at cluster level.
  • getDiag: produce diagnostic plots for the fitted model.
  • hatchPlot: plot variables on a map with hatching indicating the width of the credible interval.
• The following help functions are added:
  • getAdjusted: produce adjusted estimates for a fitted model
  • getAmat: automatic extract spatial adjacency matrix from the polygon file.
  • getCounts: aggregate person-month data into counts and totals by groups.
  • mapPoints: map GPS points to polygon regions.
    
• Default prior changed to BYM2 + PC priors.
• Various name changes for function arguments to reduce ambiguity.
• Various output column name change to improve consistency across functions.
• Three set of new vignettes are provided to guide users through various modeling workflow.