Dirk Eddelbuettel

Thu, 17 Aug 2017

RcppArmadillo 0.7.960.1.0

armadillo image

The bi-monthly RcppArmadillo release is out with a new version 0.7.960.1.0 which is now on CRAN, and will get to Debian in due course.

And it is a big one. Lots of nice upstream changes from Armadillo, and lots of work on our end as the Google Summer of Code project by Binxiang Ni, plus a few smaller enhancements -- see below for details.

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language--and is widely used by (currently) 379 other packages on CRAN---an increase of 49 since the last CRAN release in June!

Changes in this release relative to the previous CRAN release are as follows:

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.960.1.0 (2017-08-11)

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.960.1 (Northern Banana Republic Deluxe)

    • faster randn() when using OpenMP (NB: usually omitted when used fromR)

    • faster gmm_diag class, for Gaussian mixture models with diagonal covariance matrices

    • added .sum_log_p() to the gmm_diag class

    • added gmm_full class, for Gaussian mixture models with full covariance matrices

    • expanded .each_slice() to optionally use OpenMP for multi-threaded execution

  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.950.0 (Northern Banana Republic)

    • expanded accu() and sum() to use OpenMP for processing expressions with computationally expensive element-wise functions

    • expanded trimatu() and trimatl() to allow specification of the diagonal which delineates the boundary of the triangular part

  • Enhanced support for sparse matrices (Binxiang Ni as part of Google Summer of Code 2017)

    • Add support for dtCMatrix and dsCMatrix (#135)

    • Add conversion and unit tests for dgT, dtT and dsTMatrix (#136)

    • Add conversion and unit tests for dgR, dtR and dsRMatrix (#139)

    • Add conversion and unit tests for pMatrix and ddiMatrix (#140)

    • Rewrite conversion for dgT, dtT and dsTMatrix, and add file-based tests (#142)

    • Add conversion and unit tests for indMatrix (#144)

    • Rewrite conversion for ddiMatrix (#145)

    • Add a warning message for matrices that cannot be converted (#147)

    • Add new vignette for sparse matrix support (#152; Dirk in #153)

    • Add support for sparse matrix conversion from Python SciPy (#158 addressing #141)

  • Optional return of row or column vectors in collapsed form if appropriate #define is set (Serguei Sokol in #151 and #154)

  • Correct speye() for non-symmetric cases (Qiang Kou in #150 closing #149).

  • Ensure tests using Scientific Python and reticulate are properly conditioned on the packages being present.

  • Added .aspell/ directory with small local directory now supported by R-devel.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

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