NEWS

polycor 0.8-1 (2022-01-11)

Further enhancements to warnings in hetcor() and error reporting in polyserial(); my thanks to Adrian Dusa for changes to his admisc::tryCatchWEM() facilitating these enhancements.
polychor() and polyserial() can return estimated thresholds even when std.err=FALSE, via new thresholds argument; hetcor() has also acquired a thresholds argument (suggestions of Florian Schuberth).
New methods for standard generics, including summary(), coef(), and vcov().

hetcor() can optionally use parallel computations (suggestion of Marc Segond).
polychor() and polyserial() now allow user-specified start values (suggestion of someone whose name is lost to antiquity, with my apologies).
Cases where correlations can't be computed (e.g., because a factor has only one level in the data) are handled more gracefully in hetcor().

Let hetcor() work with objects that inherit from "data.frame" (suggestion of Emil O. W. Kirkegaard).
Allow empty pairs when use="pairwise.complete.obs" for hetcor() (suggestion of Emil O. W. Kirkegaard).
Allow character variables in hetcor() but print message.

Further protection/warnings against inadmissible correlations.
Protect against out-of-order thresholds during optimization (suggestion of Evgeny Mirkes).
hetcor() doesn't die when an error is thrown computing a correlation, which is now set to NA.
hetcor() now uses Matrix::nearPD() to force a postitive-definite result rather than the deprecated sfsmisc::nearcor() (suggestion of Timothy Bates).
Improved clarity of documentation.
See the CHANGES file for prior versions.