geostan 0.5.0

New additions

The package now provides some support for spatial regression with raster data, including for layers with hundreds of thousands of observations (possibly more, depending on one’s computational resources). Two new additions make this possible.

• slim = TRUE The model fitting functions (stan_glm, stan_car, stan_sar, stan_esf, stan_icar) now provide the option to trim down the parameters for which MCMC samples are collected. For large N and/or many N-length vectors of parameters, this option can speed up sampling considerably and reduce memory usage. The new drop argument provides users control over which parameter vectors will be ignored. This functionality may be helpful for any number of purposes, including modeling large data sets, measurement error models, and Monte Carlo studies.
• prep_sar_data2 and prep_car_data2 These two functions can quickly prepare required data for SAR and CAR models when using raster layers (observations on a regularly spaced grid). The standard and more generally applicable functions, prep_car_data and prep_sar_data, are limited in terms of the size of spatial weights matrices they can handle. These new functions are discussed in a new vignette titled “Raster regression." See vignette("raster-regression", package = "geostan").

Minor changes

The PDF documentation has been improved—previously, multi-line equations were not rendered properly. Now they render correctly, and a mistake in the description of Binomial CAR models has been corrected.

v0.4.1

geostan 0.4.1

Minor changes

• The recommended citation for the software has been updated since the software has gone through peer-review in The Journal of Open Source Software. Many thanks to the two peer reviewers of the project, Chris Jochem and Virgilio Gómez Rubio. The following changes were introduced following Chris J.'s recommendations.
• The spatial diagonstic function (sp_diag) will now take a spatial connectivity matrix from the fitted model object provided by the user. This way the matrix will be the same one that was used to fit the model. (All of the model fitting functions have been updated to support this functionality.)
• The documentation of the methods for fitted models (residuals, fitted, spatial, etc.) were previously packed into one page. Now, the documentation is spread over a few pages and the methods are grouped together in a more reasonable fashion.

0.4.1

This pre-release is connected to the JOSS article: geostan: An R package for Bayesian spatial analysis. Some additional changes were implemented before sending version 0.4.1 to CRAN.

geostan 0.4.0

New Additions

SAR models

The simultaneously-specified spatial autoregressive (SAR) model---referred to as the spatial error model (SEM) in the spatial econometrics literature---has been implemented. The SAR model can be applied directly to continuous data (as the likelihood function) or it can be used as prior model for spatially autocorrelated parameters. Details are provided on the documentation page for the stan_sar function.

Minor changes

• Previously, when getting fitted values from an auto-normal model (i.e., the CAR model with family = auto_gaussian()) the fitted values did not include the implicit spatial trend. Now, the fitted.geostan_fit method will return the fitted values with the implicit spatial trend (by default; change using the trend argument); this is consistent with the behavior of residuals.geostan_fit, which has an option to detrend the residuals. This applies to the SAR and CAR auto-normal specifications. For details, see the documentation pages for stan_car and stan_sar.

• The documentation for the models (stan_glm, stan_car, stan_esf, stan_icar, stan_sar) now uses Latex to typeset the model equations.

geostan 0.3.0

New additions

• New exploratory spatial data analysis functions have been added: the Geary Ratio (GR) and the local Geary's C. These complement the Moran coefficient and local Moran's I.
• The vignette on spatial autocorrelation has been updated and expanded, including with a short discussion of exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA).
• The vignette on spatial measurement error models/working with ACS data has been completely re-written.

Minor changes

• geostan models can now be used with the bridgesampling package for model camparison with Bayes factors (e.g., use bridge_sampler(geostan_fit$stanfit)). By default, geostan only collects MCMC samples for parameters that are expected to be of some interest for users. To become compatible with bridgesampling, the keep_all argument was added to all of the model fitting functions. For important background and details see the bridgesampling package documentation and vignettes on CRAN.
• stan_car now has an option to provide the connectivity matrix C, which is used to calculate spatial-lag of X (SLX) terms and residual spatial autocorrelation. Previously, there was no option to provide this matrix, as it was taken from the car_parts argument. However, that choice is only appropriate when the WCAR specification is used. Now, if C is missing and the WCAR specification has not been used a warning will appear.
• Previously, the lisa function would automatically center and scale the variate before computing local Moran's I. Now, the variate will be centered and scaled by default but the user has the option to turn the scaling off (so the variate will be centered, but not divided by its standard deviation). This function also row-standardized the spatial weights matrix automatically, but there was no reason why. That's not done anymore.

geostan 0.2.1

geostan's first release on CRAN

geostan 0.2.0

v0.2.0

clarify install requirements