[amelia] Amelia 1.7

Hi folks, James, Gary, and I are happy to announce Amelia 1.7 is up on CRAN for your enjoyment. You can install the update from the R prompt with the following line of code: install.packages("Amelia", repos = "http://cran.r-project.org") We have also updated the Windows installer at: http://gking.harvard.edu/amelia Amelia 1.7 brings a fairly large update to Amelia, which includes a complete rewrite of the Amelia internals to Rcpp. What does this mean for you? Much, much faster imputations (we have seen speedups of 10x on some examples). We have also added support for running Amelia in parallel using multiple cores in modern CPUs. You can find more about parallel in section 4.3 on page 16 of the Amelia manual: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Amelia/vignettes/amelia.pdf Overall, this version should make imputations much faster. Other improvements and bugfixes: * Plots in AmeliaView should now use Quartz on Mac OS X instead of X11. * Amelia now requires R >=2.14.0. * Amelia now can run its imputations in parallel using infrastructure from R's parallel package. Note that R < 2.15.3 will crash if parallel is used while tcltk is loaded (or has been loaded and then unloaded). This will be fixed in R 2.15.3 (the patched version of 2.15.2) and we will require R>=2.15.3 when that version is released. * Fixed bug with character variables set to nominal. Please let us know if you run into any problems with this new version. Cheers, matt. ~~~~~~~~~~~ Matthew Blackwell Assistant Professor of Political Science University of Rochester url: http://www.mattblackwell.org