NIMBLE version 0.13.0 released

[Chris Paciorek]

We've released version 0.13.0. This release provides new functionality (in particular improved handling of predictive nodes in MCMC) and minor bug fixes, including:

• Thoroughly revamping handling of posterior predictive nodes in the MCMC system, in particular that MCMC samplers, by default, will now exclude predictive dependencies from internal sampler calculations. This should improve MCMC mixing for models with predictive nodes. Posterior predictive nodes are now sampled conditional on all other model nodes at the end of each MCMC iteration.
• Adding functionality to the MCMC configuration system, including a new replaceSamplers method and arguments default and nodes for the addSamplers method.
• Adding an option to the WAIC system to allow additional burnin (in addition to standard MCMC burnin) before calculating online WAIC, thereby allowing inspection of initial samples without forcing them to be used for WAIC.
• Warning users of unused constants during model building.
• Fixing bugs that prevented use of variables starting with 'logProb' or named 'i' in model code.
• Fixing a bug to prevent infinite recursion in particular cases in conjugacy checking.
• Fixing a bug in simulating from dcar_normal nodes when multiple nodes passed to simulate.

Please see the NEWS file in the installed package for more details (https://github.com/nimble-dev/nimble/blob/devel/packages/nimble/inst/NEWS).

- Chris Paciorek for the NIMBLE Development Team