A new major release 4.000 of Armadillo came out out yesterday morning. This is a new stable release by Conrad with a new major number, and it brings a few nice changes as detailed below. I rolled up RcppArmadillo version 0.400 yesterday morning, and following a little bit of discussion this version is now on CRAN and in Debian.

The complete list of changes is below.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.000 (2014-01-05)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.000 (Feral Steamroller)

  • added eigen decompositions of sparse matrices: eigs_sym() and eigs_gen() [ but this requires linking against ARPACK which RcppArmadillo as a pure-template package does not do, and R is not linked against ARPACK either. ]

  • added eigen decomposition for pair of matrices: eig_pair()

  • added simpler forms of eig_gen()

  • added condition number of matrices: cond()

  • expanded find() to handle cubes

  • expanded subcube views to access elements specified in a vector

  • template argument for running_stat_vec expanded to accept vector types

  • more robust fast inverse of 4×4 matrices

  • faster divide-and-conquer decompositions are now used by default for eig_sym(), pinv(), princomp(), rank(), svd(), svd_econ()

  • the form inv(sympd(X)) no longer assumes that X is positive definite; use inv_sympd() instead

  • added MEX connector for interfacing Octave/Matlab with Armadillo matrices (contributed by George Yammine)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.