NEWS

---

RobAStBase 1.2.7 (2025-01-14)

under the hood

• adapted reference output for new startupmsg
• transformed CITATION file to new format, i.e., bibentry() instead of citEntry(), c(as.person( .... ), as.person( .... ), ...), instead of as.personList(....)

RobAStBase 1.2.6 (2024-09-02)

under the hood

with the help of K. Hornik identified spurious, platform dependent LF/CR issue

and capsulated calls to infoShow() in Rd files by

• ## IGNORE_RDIFF_BEGIN ## IGNORE_RDIFF_END

RobAStBase 1.2.4

user-visible CHANGES

• CITATION file now use bibentry

RobAStBase 1.2.3 (2022-11-16)

under the hood

• triggered by new NOTES uncovered by R CMD check, we deleted duplicate entries for items in internal_plots.Rd
• use \bm instead of \boldmath in man pages

RobAStBase 1.2.2 (2022-08-22)

• fixed an issue with KaTeX (which does not know \boldmath ...)
• fixed some broken URLs and changed URLs from http to https where possible

RobAStBase 1.2.1 (2019-04-25)

user-visible CHANGES

• revised code to delete fuzz when checking the centering/consistency of pICs varying from -- relative accuracy is now determined by the size of trafo-matrix

under the hood

• use S3 method distrMod::print.relMatrix) to capture the fact that when computing relative differences in consistency matrices, some entries in the denominator may be 0; in order to avoid output of Inf / NaN we catch the output and replace such entries by "."

RobAStBase 1.2

user-visible CHANGES

• slot function modifyIC of the different IC classes gains an argument withMakeIC to be able to adjust this to a higher granularity
• updated required package versions in DESCRIPTION
• kStepEstimator and oneStepEstimator gain argument E.argList which is NULL (default) or a named list of arguments to be passed to calls to \code{E} from kStepEstimator; potential clashes with arguments of the same name in "..." are resolved by inserting the items of list E.argList as named items to the argument lists, so in case of collisions the item of E.argList overwrites the existing one from "..."
• particular checkIC methods are now documented in documentation object checkIC (and no longer with class IC); there argument out is documented
• kStepEstimator, getboundedIC, getRiskIC for signature (IC, asCov, missing, L2ParamFamily), checkIC and makeIC gain argument diagnostic to be able to show diagnostic information on integrations; this information (if argument "diagnostic" is TRUE) is stored in attribute "diagnostic" of the return value
• accessor "timings" to attribute "timings" of an object of class "kStepEstimate"

bugfixes

• and a forgotten no longer used instance of oldmodif in kStepEstimator
• set.seed(123) xn1 <- rnbinom(100,size=25,prob=0.2) N1.w <- NbinomwithSizeFamily(size = 25, prob = 0.25) print(CvMMDEstimator(xn1,N1.w,.withEvalAsVar=FALSE))

under the hood

• new S4 (estimator) class "MCALEstimate" containing both "MCEstimate" and "ALEstimate" to make accessible pIC-methods to CvMMDEstimators...
• some unnecessary coercions (with informatino loss) in show methods
• new .checkEstClassForParamFamily method to force (expost) casting to MCALEstimate (with pIC) {[with subclasses ML.ALEstimate, CvMMD.ALEstimate]}
• to speed up things slot pIC is filled with a promise only which is only forced when called through accessor pIC (and then the slot is filled with the actual pIC)
• technically this is realized by a slot pIC of class OptionalInfluenceCurveOrCall
• internal function .getPIC is the workhorse: it takes the estimator evaluates its argument ParamFamily from slot estimate.call and moves it to the parameter value which was estimated; at this parameter value, the IC is constructed
• extended accuracy in NbinomFamily
• new internal helper method getPIC to get hand on the pIC --> for MLE it computes it by optIC --> for CvMMDEstimators -- it uses the name of the estimator; more specifically it relies on tag * "( mu = emp. cdf )" => this uses .CvMMDCovarianceWithMux * "( mu = model distr. )" => this uses .CvMMDCovariance with no argument mu * "( mu = muname )" => this uses .CvMMDCovariance with argument mu to get the pIC
• only MLEs and CvMMDEs (of class MCEstimate) are automatically cast to ALEstimate / surrogate classes ML.ALEstimate / CvMMD.ALEstimate i.e., the ".checkEstClassForParamFamily" for MCEstimate is removed / set to trivial identity
• force optimal ICs to respect the support of the model distribution careful testing gave: during evaluation of kStepEstimator it is prohibitive to put line liesInSupport in each of the coordinate functions as this blows up the integration time for covariances; instead, we use helper .fixInLiesInSupport in file generateICfct.R which after computation of variances inserts this in the Maps of the IC
• for time checking use file TimingChecks.R (with the preparation that the lines commented out by ##-t-## in kStepEstimator.R have to be activated; this uses helper function .addTime to produce a matrix with detailed timing information which can be read out as argument )
• for time checking in kStepEstimator, the preliminary solution with timings to be commented (special comments ##-t-##) in and out has been replaced by permanent calls to proc.time(); this way we avoid creating new environments (which is time-consuming!) through functions calls to system.time. helper function .addTime has been adapted accordingly
• now specified that we want to use distr::solve
• now generateIC.fct produces vectorized functions (can now use useApply=FALSE in E())
• checkIC and makeIC now both use helper function .preparedirectCheckMakeIC which allows for extra arguments for E() and integrates coordinate wise with useApply = FALSE to gain speed (code has moved from file IC.R to file CheckMakeIC.R)
• several methods (getRiskIC, getBiasIC, getBoundedIC, makeIC, checkIC, modifyIC) gain argument "..." to pass on arguments to E()
• .filterEargs from distrEx is used to filter out arguments from dots which are meant for E(); this is extended in RobAStBase::.filterEargsWEargList(): .filterEargsWEargList() also checks if an argument "E.argList" is hidden in "..." and if so, filters in its entries (and in case of collision overwrites existing entries).
• getboundedIC now uses coordinate-wise integration with useApply = FALSE and only computing the upper half of E LL'w
• kStepEstimator, checkIC/makeIC, getRiskIC (for signature (IC, asCov, missing, L2ParamFamily)) and getboundedIC now if (diagnostic==TRUE) return diagnostic attributes of S3 class "DiagnosticClass"

RobAStBase 1.1

user-visible CHANGES

• plot-methods now have arguments .nonlbs to only plot (but not label) some points
• all diagnostics (including qqplot and returnlevelplot) have adopted the same argument naming (and selection paradigm) the suffix is .lbs instead of .lbl, the attributes of shown points have ending .pts the observations are classed into three groups: - the labelled observations selected through which.lbs and which.Order - the shown non labelled observations (which are not in the previous set) selected by which.nonlbs - the non-shown observations (the remaining ones not contained in the former 2 grps) -> point attributes may either refer to prior selection or to post-selection in which case we have .npts variants
• changed the default plotting symbol to 19
• plot-methods are vectorized to a higher extent in all arguments
• plot methods now return an S3 object of class \code{c("plotInfo","DiagnInfo")}, i.e., a list containing the information needed to produce the respective plot, which at a later stage could be used by different graphic engines (like, e.g. \code{ggplot}) to produce the plot in a different framework. A more detailed description will follow in a subsequent version.
• new methods for returnlevelplot for RobModel, InfRobModel, kStepEstimate (as qqplot)
• unified return values for qqplot
• oneStepEstimator and kStepEstimator gain an argument withMakeIC
• optIC gains an argument withMakeIC
• DESCRIPTION tag SVNRevision changed to VCS/SVNRevision
• getRiskIC and getBiasIC gain argument withCheck to speed up things if one does not want to call checkIC
• getRiskIC and getBiasIC gain argument withCheck to speed up things if one does not want to call checkIC
• in kStepEstimator, withCheck is set to FALSE when getRiskIC is called, and makeIC is only called just before the last update, and, if useLast == TRUE for the last update (of course, only if withMakeIC ==TRUE)

Return value of "roptest

• the return value of "roptest", an object of class "kStepEstimate" has a slot "estimate.call" which contains the (matched) call to "roptest"; internally "roptest" calls "robest"; the call to "robest" may be of interest, too, so we have a new slot "robestCall" of class "OptionalCall", ie a call or NULL (default); it can be accessed via function robestCall()
• the return value of "roptest", an object of class "kStepEstimate" has a slot "estimate.call" which contains the (matched) call to "roptest"; internally "roptest" calls "robest"; the call to "robest" may be of interest, too, so we have a new slot "robestCall" of class "OptionalCall", ie a call or NULL (default); it can be accessed via function robestCall()

bug fix:

• slot modifyIC was set to a wrong value in makeIC / former (potential) move was overridden
• in .preparePanelFirstLast if condition with.automatic.grid was (possibly) vector valued
• in qqplot & returnlevelplot for x = "ANY", y = "kStepEstimate" the weight function needs not to be bounded by 1 (e.g. in case of MBRE), so the numeric weights are scaled to [0,1] first

under the hood

• wherever possible also use q.l internally instead of q to provide functionality in IRKernel

RobAStBase 1.0.2 (2018-06-01)

• corrected to if-conditions with length > 1

RobAStBase 1.0.1 (2017-04-23)

user-visible CHANGES

• moved getFiRisk from ROptEst to RobAstBase

RobAStBase 1.0 (2016-09-05)

user-visible CHANGES

• comparePlot, infoPlot, and the plot-Method for ICs gain an argument with.automatic.grid; if TRUE a corresponding grid oriented at tickmarks is produced; this also works for rescaled axes
• comparePlot, infoPlot, and the plot-Method for ICs gain optional pattern substitution (like plot) which can be switched off by argument withSubst
• arguments panel.first, panel.last for plot-methods can now be lists
• infoPlot and comparePlot gain an argument cex.pts.fun to enable individual scaling of the point sizes to be plotted onto each of the plotted curves
• .ddPlot.MatNtNtCoCo, and also ddPlot, outlyingnessPlot gain an additional argument 'doplot' defaulting to TRUE; if FALSE, no plot is produced and only the return value is calculated.
• arguments scaleY.fct and scaleY.inv in the plot-method for ICs, and in comparePlot und infoPlot now also may be lists of functions, one for each of the panels to be plot; hence scaling of the y-axis can now be done individually for each panel.
• introduce jitter for points in ddPlot for DiscreteDistributions
• comparePlot, infoPlot, and the plot-Method for ICs gain an argument x.vec; if given it is the x-grid on which to evaluate the ICs; by default this argument is NULL; then (as before) the grid is selected automatically according to the distribution of the IC. This can be useful for usage with a rescaling of the x-Axis to avoid that the evaluation points be selected too unevenly (i.e. on an equally spaced grid in the original scale, but then, after rescaling non-equally... The grid has to be specified in original scale; i.e.; when used with rescaling, should be chosen non-equally spaced...
• wrapper functions ICPlot, InfoPlot, and ComparePlot use refined grids, i.e., the grids are plotted on user given coordinates (or rescaled coordinates)
• comparePlot, infoPlot, and the plot-Method for ICs now if scaleX is TRUE by default use an equidistant grid on the rescaled x-Axis.
• qqplot-method for c("ANY","InfRobModel") gains argument 'cex.pts.fun' to better control the scaling of points-sizes
• new helper function cutoff.quant() to produce cutoff from model quantiles

GENERAL ENHANCEMENTS

under the hood

• introduced automatic scaling of points in comparePlot.R and infoPlot.R
• .cexscale is now documented
• the argument of .fillList is now automatically cast to list (if necessary).
• interpolRisks gain biastype and normtype methods, as well as getRiskFctBV => now cniperPointPlot should work for GPD-type data
• added reference for copied routine stats:::format.perc
• in the axis annotation (after rescaling) there are checks now whether values +-infinity are taken at all. (This was a bug before for distributions passed on as cdf and quantile function with finite left or right endpoint.)
• output in kStepEstimator() and oneStepEstimator() is filtered by .checkEstClassForParamFamily(); this allows to return an object of S4 class specific to the resp. parametric family (by means of S4 method dispatch); this is used in pkg 'RobExtremes' to produce, e.g., objects of class "GEVkStepEstimate", i.e. which inherit from both "kStepEstimate", so that a diag-method for "GEVEstimate" becomes available for this class.
• enhanced imports in DESCRIPTION by explicating second order imports

BUGFIXES

• two bugs in plotWrapper.R in pkgs RobAStBase and ROptEst detected by Misha
• bug in kStepEstimator: after evaluation of starting estimator, IC must be shifted to correct parameter value -> new arguments withPreModif, withPostModif
• in comparePlot it should be resc.Dargs instead of rescD.args
• fixed errors detected by Matthias / Misha, Bernhard in comparePlot.R, cutoff-class.R, ddPlot_utils.R, infoPlot.R, outlyingPlot.R
• comparePlot now plots the whole range
• ddPlots / outlyingPlot.R now have alpha transparency and jitter and cex.pts
• infoPlot plots the correct y-axis (no overplotting)
• minor fixes in InfoPlotWrapper.Rd, outlyingPlotIC.Rd
• fixed NA-buglet in plotWrapper.R (detected by Dasha Pupashenko)
• fixed a little bug with the use of .cexscale (with list of functions)
• bugfix in outlyingnessPlot: for robCov.y ==TRUE (default) the inverse covariance matrix was used for standardization instead of the original one

RobAStBase 0.9 (2013-09-13)

user-visible CHANGES

• new wrapper function InfoPlot, ComparePlot, PlotIC

GENERAL ENHANCEMENTS

• RobASt-Pkgs: DESCRIPTION depends become stricter (requiring distrMod, distrEx, distr >=2.4 to be on the safe side)
• deleted chm folders — they are no longer needed
• added argument no.readonly = TRUE in all assignments of type opar <- par();
• commented out all assignments of type omar$cin <- NULL
• removed calls to require from R sources and replaced it by directives in the NAMESPACE file
• all packages get a DESCRIPTION tag "ByteCompile"

under the hood

• wrapper functions use default rescaling controlled by S4-method rescaleFct dispatching on the respective model
• added .Rbuildignore
• cleaned DESCRIPTION and NAMESPACE file as to Imports/Depends
• created new interpolRisk-class to be able to use speed up in (new version) of roptest
• interpolRisks extended by slot samplesize
• implemented scale estimation on log-scale for kStepEstimator
• in kStepEstimator asyvar of starting estimator is no longer computed (unless done so anyway in the call to the starting estimator)/ as not needed
• in kStepEstimator one can now delay evaluations of covariance matrices, depending on new argument withEvalAsVar
• a small change in kStepEstimator -- now uses the (possibly nonlinear) trafo instead of the Jacobian to get the pIC-estimator from the untransformed estimator
• in kStepEstimator we force an argument list (to avoid an "argument missing" error)
• checkIC now also reports relative errors (has possibly already been there but not merged?)
• new S4methods/functions moveL2Fam2RefParam and moveICBackFromRefParam to only solve optimization problems for ICs at reference parameters (if these are available) and the to backtransform the IC to the original parameter (is not yet in place in optIC; still testing necessary).
• the accessor to slot Risks now checks if all items of the list are already evaluated or if some calls still have to be forced; to this end it uses new auxiliary .evalListRec
• minor Enhancements of ddPlot, changes in outlyingPlot
• modularized diagnostic plots; still checking + debugging necessary
• documented helper functions
• thx to hint by Matthias (NAMESPACE), and some (more specific) Rd-links to gettextf, now no more notes or warnings in R-2.16.0dev
• .rescalefct looses argument scaleY.inv (not needed).
• use of unit tests

BUGFIXES

• Bug in infoPlot(), detected by Nataliya Horbenko, tentatively fixed
• use of colnames instead of sampleNames to avoid the error on CRAN ...
• fixed some 1-dim vs >1-dim issues in kStepEstimator.R
• ...and yet some correction as to variances
• Removed "..." in definition of generic for "samplesize<-", this had led to a warning in R CMD check.
• .evalListRec was not prepared for length 0
• some substitute functions have not been passed as arguments...

RobAStBase 0.8 (2011-01-20)

USER-VISIBLE CHANGES

• new helper methods makeIC to apply to functions or list of functions for easily producing (suboptimal) ICs
• included risk computation for sin,cos-IC in makeIC-methods.Rd
• qqplot for RobModel now produces outlier adjusted CIs
• ddPlot: additional annotation parameters (all with reasonable defaults) -text.abline: controls whether cutoff lines get labeled -text.abline.x, -text.abline.y: text to be added as labels, defaults to something like "95%-cutoff = 4.32" 4.32 the cutoff value) -cex.abline, -col.abline, -font.abline, -adj.abline: respective parameters for labels -text.abline.x.x, -text.abline.x.y, -text.abline.y.x, -text.abline.y.y: coordinates of labels, -text.abline.x.fmt.cx, -text.abline.x.fmt.qx, -text.abline.y.fmt.cy, -text.abline.y.fmt.qy: format strings for cutoff quantiles and values in labels -arguments cex.idn and col.idn now if missing first check against arguments cex and col respectively before using defaults par("cex") and par("col") respectively
• for restoring old par() values, not all attributes may be set; hence deleted them from stored value in plot functions by something like opar$cin <- opar$cra <- opar$csi <- opar$cxy <- opar$din <- NULL
• infoPlot gains arguments ylab.rel and ylab.abs to set the label for y axis (as requested by N. Horbenko)
• DESCRIPTION files and package-help files gain a tag SVNRevision to be filled by get[All]RevNr.R from utils in distr

BUGFIXES

• you could not place single plots where you wanted...
• Nataliya found yet another bug in infoPlot.R

RobAStBase 0.7 (2009-11-04)

user-visible CHANGES

• enhanced plotting: * new diagnostic function qqplot to check the quality of a model fit
• special methods for second argument of class "RobModel", "InfRobModel", and "kStepEstimate"
• comes with corresponding (pointwise/simultaneous) confidence intervals
• for "RobModel", "InfRobModel": sizing of points and labels according to Mahalanobis size of points / any other distance function
• for "kStepEstimate": fading / sizing of points and labels according to weight of corresponding [p]IC * suggestions by A. Unwin, Augsburg; plot for ICs, infoPlot, and comparePlot may be restricted to selected subplots; * ylim can now be matrix-valued... * infoPlot and comparePlot now have a placeable legend location - argument * plot functions gain data argument: it is "y" for plot(IC, numeric) and for comparePlot, for infoPlot it is argument "data" * plot functions gain arguments - which.lbs : select some data indices for plotting, - which.Order : select some order statistics from the remaining data for plotting (ordered; w.r.t. norm of IC) (in descending order) - return.Order : shall ordering be printed out?
• documentation * added some UML class diagrams
• checking functions * checkIC gains ... argument to pass on accuracy arguments to E()
• estimators * unified treatmend of NAs: - class Estimate gains slot completecases to control for NA in the input - slot samplesize only counts remaining cases - samplesize accessor has argument onlycompletecases and hence can issue both remaining and original samplesize - locMEstimator gains arg na.rm * class kStepEstimator gains slots - start: argument start of kStepEstimator - startval:matrix of transformed starting values - ustarval:matrix of untransformed starting values - ksteps: matrix of (intermediate) transformed estimates - uksteps: matrix of (intermediate) untransformed estimates - ICList: optional: the (intermediate) (total) ICs - pICList: optional: the (intermediate) [p]ICs and corresponding accessors * oneStepEstimator and kStepEstimator gain an argument startArgList
• ICs * we now can digest case p=1, k>1 for asymmetric biastypes as well as for total variation
• new getRobAStBaseOption-s * "all.verbose" : globally set verbose to TRUE * "withUpdateInKer" — what to do in kStep on ker(D) * "IC.UpdateInKer" — IC to use in kStep on ker(D)
• utilities: * robModel gains trafo and trafo<- methods to access/modify slot trafo * RobAStBaseMASK for masked methods * replacement function radius for Neighborhood

GENERAL ENHANCEMENTS

• added tests/Examples folder with file RobAStBase-Ex.Rout.save to have some automatic testing
• added TOBEDONE (sic!) files; in English (for possible collaborators)
• added keyword robust and made some minor corrections ...
• added/updated NEWS files, updated CITATION files using code by A. Zeileis
• Rd-parsing: * patch for Brian Ripley's Re: [Rd] Warning: missing text for item ... in \describe? * fixed errors / warnings in .Rd files detected by parser 2 (c.f. [Rd] More intensive checking of R help files, Prof Brian Ripley, 09.01.2009 10:25)
• svn-revision-tags * added in all DESCRIPTION files * added field "Encoding: latin1" to all DESCRIPTION files because substituting $LastChangedDate by svn would cause problems for packages built under Windows (German) local when checking under Linux.
• removed pdf-file from version control - Rnw-file is sufficient

INTERNALLY

• estimators * implementation of oneStepEstimator simplified, no longer dispatching on argument "start".
• plotting * also named parameters are used in axis annotation if available. * plot-methods now accept to.draw.arg no matter whether mfColRow==TRUE or FALSE
• for consistency mat item in trafo slot is now always matrix(1)
• changes for treatment of kStepEstimator with nuisance parameters...
• oneStepEstimator and kStepEstimator implemented anew * oneStepEstimator and kStepEstimator no longer are generic. * kStepEstimator - now only uses one function - works with non-trivial trafo - has new arguments withUpdateInKer : shall we update IC in ker(D)? IC.UpdateInKer : which is the default IC to be taken for ker(D) -- default = NULL in which case we use getBoundedIC na.rm : unified treatment of missings * new generic function kStepEstimatorStart to produce starting values for one/kstep works with - numeric - estimate - function (to be evaluated at data x) * kStepEstimatorStart-method for function now has arguments (start, x, nrvalues, na.rm, L2Fam, startList) * oneStepEstimator now basically calls kStepEstimator except for the case when IC is not of class "IC", in which similar code is adapted by hand
• kStepEstimator - we do update only on demand, i.e. when with.u.var is TRUE (which is true only in the last iteration step) if (! var.to.be.c), ie. if asvar information is missing in the optimized IC, we calculate it as var0 <- matrix(E(L2Fam, IC.c %*% t(IC.c)),p,p) - deletion of dim attribute (which enters after rowMean(....) - naming of coordinates of [untransformed.]estimate and [untransformed.]asvar is done consistently to slot param - in case no variance is computed in optIC asvar is determined by E() in pxp dimension (= !var.to.be.c) computations in k-Space are more problematic than thought if matrix D has not got full rank or nuisance parameters are present: * k-dimensional untransformed.estimate this was clear; no problems as to this; works for both options withUpdateInKer TRUE or FALSE * k-dimensional IC D^- %*% pIC is not an IC in case ker D is not trivial. two options: -> withUpdateInKer FALSE: be content with a solution in Psi^(D^-D) ... IC.tot = IC.tot1 = D^- %*% pIC -> withUpdateInKer TRUE: complete IC.tot1 by addition of IC.tot2 = projker %*% IC2 for projker = I - D^-D and IC2 is either a given IC IC.UpdateInKer or a default bounded IC gotten by getBoundedIC. * kxk dimensinoal var this is most problematic in case ker D is non-trivial: - if argument start is of class ALEstimate and has a non-NULL pIC-slot IC0, this one is taken for computation of untransformed.asvar, i.e. IC.tot.0 = projker %*% IC0 + D^- %*% pIC and untransformed.asvar = E(IC.tot.0 %*% IC.tot.0' ) otherwise NULL is returned in this case - if argument start is of class Estimate and has a non-NULL asvar-slot the one is taken later - variances u.var and var0 are calculated in internal function
• new function getBoundedIC to produce (arbitrarily; in fact rather large b) bounded IC as EuclRandVariable used in kStepEstimator to give default IC to be projected on ker D.
• .onAttach now uses startupmessages
• StartClass now also contains "matrix"
• argument "start" in kStepEstimator and oneStepEstimator is NULL by default (and then replaced by L2Fam@startPar)
• clip and start obtain signatures acc. to graphics/stats methods
• introduce particular show methods for [Optional]pICList
• new file kStepEstimate.R (forgot to upload so far)
• S4 methods for masked functions in masked.R
• new generic radius<- for Neighborhood

BUGFIXES

• in plotting functions: * fixed xlim and ylim args for plots; * fixed some bugs with lty[I], lwd[I], col[I] in comparePlot and infoPlot * legend.location was missing in usage-section * bug(?) in plot corrected now works for trafo ... similar bug in plot method for L2ParamFamily?! * minor correction of plot title * infoPlot.R minor bugs corrected - seems to work now, but code has some fragile points ... * removed some little bug in comparePlot.R
• Rd docu: * minor documentation error in infoPlot.Rd
• small bug in checkIC corrected
• the "dim" attribute issue: * new kstepEstimator returned [untransformed.]estimates with dim - attribute ... this caused e.g. problems in RobLox, in rlsOptIC.AL.Rd, changed this; * yet another small change ... to eliminate non-wanted dim-attribute
• minor typo in kStepEstimator

RobAStBase 0.1.3 (2008-11-29)

• new plotting features similar to package distr
• new plotting functionality: ddPlot and outlyingPlot
• introduced option("newDevice") to control new opening of graphic devices
• use of on.exit() to restore old settings for options() and par() at the end of functions
• introduction of NEWS-file
• update of CITATION-file (based on code provided by A. Zeileis on R help)