pomp version 5.9 has been released to CRAN and will soon appear on a mirror near you. This release contains an important change to the user interface, as well as a bug fix and one new experimental feature.

User-visible change

As documented in the manual, basic model components have access to parameters, covariates, state variables, and in some cases, the data. To make additional elements available to the basic model components, pomp provides the “userdata” facility. From this version, such elements should be furnished to pomp functions in a list via the argument userdata. For the present, the old behavior will still work, but will generate a warning. In a future release, this will become an error.

Bug fix

A bug in covariate-table extrapolation for the case order="constant" has been fixed.

Feature enhancement

A new experimental function repair_lookup_table is provided to help eliminate unnecessary warnings about extrapolation. One can use it “repair” a covariate table that does not span the full temporal range of observations. This is simply a matter of performing the extrapolations and adding them to the lookup table. See the manual for more information and an example.

Other changes

Functions with names that include dots (.), which have been defunct since version 4.7, have now been expunged entirely.


NSF
NCEAS
NIH

This software has been made possible by support from the U.S. National Science Foundation (Grants #EF-0545276, #EF-0430120), by the “Inference for Mechanistic Models” Working Group supported by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (a Center funded by N.S.F. (Grant #DEB-0553768), the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the State of California), and by the RAPIDD program of the Science & Technology Directorate, Department of Homeland Security and the Fogarty International Center, U.S. National Institutes of Health.