Package Update Roundup: Nov 2009

This is a list of new or updated packages that were released for R in November, as announced on the r-packages mailing list. To include other updates on this list, please email David Smith. For a complete list of all updates on CRAN, see the CRANberries archive for November 2009. Follow package name links for ratings and other information on crantastic.org.

debug, a debugger for R functions, with code display, graceful error recovery, line-numbered conditional breakpoints, access to exit code, flow control, and full keyboard input, has been updated with bug fixes.

dse, a package for multivariate ARMA and state space time series modelling and forecasting, has been updated. 

The distr-family of packages (distr, distrEx, distrSim, distrTEst, distrTeach, distrMod, distrEllipse, distrDoc, startupmsg and SweaveListingUtils) have been extensively updated.

EvalEst is a new Dynamic Systems Estimation package for evaluation of estimation methods. (These functions were formerly part of the dse bundle.)

frailtypack, a package for fitting frailty models using maximum penalized likelihood estimation, has been updated.

ff, a package for memory-efficient storage of large data on disk and fast access functions, has been updated to support large data.frames, csv import/export and more.

mvbutils, a package of tools for organization of workspaces, function/documentation editing with backups, package construction and updating and more, has been updated with some new experimental features.

NMF, a new package that implements a number of standard algorithms to perform Nonnegative Matrix Factorization and provides a flexible framework to easily test and develop new methods, was released.

TraMineR, a package for mining, describing and visualizing sequences of states or events and more generally discrete sequential data, has been updated.