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The bi-monthly RcppArmadillo release is out with a new version 0.7.960.1.0 which is now on CRAN, and will get to Debian in due course.

And it is a big one. Lots of nice upstream changes from Armadillo, and lots of work on our end as the Google Summer of Code project by Binxiang Ni, plus a few smaller enhancements — see below for details.

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 379 other packages on CRAN—an increase of 49 since the last CRAN release in June!

Changes in this release relative to the previous CRAN release are as follows:

### Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.960.1.0 (2017-08-11)

• faster randn() when using OpenMP (NB: usually omitted when used fromR)

• faster gmm_diag class, for Gaussian mixture models with diagonal covariance matrices

• added .sum_log_p() to the gmm_diag class

• added gmm_full class, for Gaussian mixture models with full covariance matrices

• expanded .each_slice() to optionally use OpenMP for multi-threaded execution

• expanded accu() and sum() to use OpenMP for processing expressions with computationally expensive element-wise functions

• expanded trimatu() and trimatl() to allow specification of the diagonal which delineates the boundary of the triangular part

• Enhanced support for sparse matrices (Binxiang Ni as part of Google Summer of Code 2017)

• Add support for dtCMatrix and dsCMatrix (#135)

• Add conversion and unit tests for dgT, dtT and dsTMatrix (#136)

• Add conversion and unit tests for dgR, dtR and dsRMatrix (#139)

• Add conversion and unit tests for pMatrix and ddiMatrix (#140)

• Rewrite conversion for dgT, dtT and dsTMatrix, and add file-based tests (#142)

• Add conversion and unit tests for indMatrix (#144)

• Rewrite conversion for ddiMatrix (#145)

• Add a warning message for matrices that cannot be converted (#147)

• Add new vignette for sparse matrix support (#152; Dirk in #153)

• Add support for sparse matrix conversion from Python SciPy (#158 addressing #141)

• Optional return of row or column vectors in collapsed form if appropriate #define is set (Serguei Sokol in #151 and #154)

• Correct speye() for non-symmetric cases (Qiang Kou in #150 closing #149).

• Ensure tests using Scientific Python and reticulate are properly conditioned on the packages being present.

• Added .aspell/ directory with small local directory now supported by R-devel.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report. 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.