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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

BMisc (development version)

  • Smaller footprint and improved performance.

    • Removed the dplyr and tidyr dependencies. The affected functions are now implemented with data.table, which was already a dependency, leading to a total reduction of ~20 packages (incl. strong recursive deps).

    • The workhorse panel “getter” functions (get_group(), get_Yit(), check_staggered(), etc.) have also been vectorized, yielding substantial performance improvements. On a simulated 200k row / 20k unit panel dataset, we observe 150-1400x speed gains, combined with an order of magnitude smaller memory allocation(s).

  • Bug fixes:

    • check_staggered() no longer (automatically) returns FALSE for panels with any treatment adoption. Previously, this function only returned TRUE when no unit ever changed treatment status.

    • get_Yit() now returns NA for units that are not observed in period tp. Previously such units contributed nothing to the result, so the returned vector was shorter than the number of rows in the data.

  • New features:

    • check_staggered() and check_staggered_inner() gain an optional tname argument. The check compares consecutive rows, so it is only meaningful when a unit’s rows are in time order; supplying tname sorts them first. The default (NULL) keeps the previous assumption that the data is already ordered.

  • Other changes:

    • get_principal_components() now returns units in sorted id order. This is only a change for data that is not already sorted by id, where it previously used order of first appearance, and it makes the function consistent with the other panel data getters.

    • get_first_difference() no longer adds a temporary .lag column to a copy of the input data, and now works when passed a data.table.

  • Fixed silent row misalignment in several vectorized panel getters (get_group(), get_Yit(), get_principal_components(), etc.) when units were not sorted by id; added sort_panel() and set_balanced_panel(), and make_balanced_panel() now preserves its input’s class instead of taking a return_data.table argument.

BMisc 1.4.9

CRAN release: 2026-06-11

  • Added .Deprecated() wrappers to 13 legacy function names (e.g., makeBalancedPanel, rhs.vars). The old names remain fully functional but now emit deprecation warnings; removal is planned for a future version.

  • Fixed bug in rhs() where it was internally calling the deprecated rhs.vars() instead of rhs_vars(), causing spurious deprecation warnings

  • Fixed bug in panel2cs2() where outcomes could shift across unit boundaries in unbalanced panels when balance_panel = FALSE

  • Updated license from GPL-2 to GPL-3

  • Updated minimum R version from 3.1.0 to 4.1.0

  • Moved caret from Imports to Suggests; it is only required for drop_collinear() and will prompt a clear error if not installed

  • Added @importFrom data.table .N .SD in place of @import data.table to reduce namespace pollution

  • Added roxygen2 examples to many previously undocumented exported functions

  • Expanded test suite with coverage for panel utilities, distribution functions, weighted statistics, formula utilities, and Rcpp functions

BMisc 1.4.8

CRAN release: 2025-02-04

  • added function weighted_combine_list for computing weighed averages of a list of matrices or vectors

  • modernized function names to snake case, keeping older function names available as internal functions

BMisc 1.4.7

CRAN release: 2025-01-10

  • moved functions t2orig and orig2t to BMisc from pte package

  • add function drop_collinear to drop collinear columns from a matrix

  • add function get_principal_components to get unit-specific principal components of time-varying variables

  • add function time_invariant_to_panel for repeating time-invariant variables, mainly with the idea of adding them into a panel data set

  • update get_group to allow for non-binary treatments

  • add function check_staggered to check if a panel data set has staggered treatment adoption, this function can work with non-binary treatments

BMisc 1.4.6

CRAN release: 2024-03-09

  • Adds functions get_group, get_YiGmin1, and get_Yi1 as utility functions for manipulating data. This is especially useful for settings with staggered treatment adoption.

  • Add functions get_lagYi and get_first_difference as more utility functions for working with panel data.

  • Add function get_Yit which recovers outcomes in period t for all units in a panel.

  • Restore default of makeBalancedPanel to return a data.frame rather than a data.table. New function argument return_data.table allows for returning a data.table if this is the desired functionality from the user.

  • Fixes documentation NOTE in id2rownum

BMisc 1.4.5

CRAN release: 2022-07-11

  • only execute examples for subsample and blockBootSample if plm package is available (thanks Achim Zeileis)

BMisc 1.4.4

CRAN release: 2022-01-26

  • faster version of panel2cs2 (thanks Kyle Butts)

BMisc 1.4.3

CRAN release: 2021-12-09

  • added Rcpp multiplier_bootstrap function

  • added TorF function, a vectorized version of isTRUE

  • allow for additional arguments in combineDfs function

BMisc 1.4.2

CRAN release: 2020-12-18

  • changed package maintainer contact information

  • added source_all function

BMisc 1.4.1

CRAN release: 2020-04-01

  • added getElementList function

BMisc 1.4.0

  • removed dependency on plm and formula.tools

  • add function blockBootSample for block bootstrapping with panel data

  • add option in makeDist to force the values of the distribution function be between 0 and 1

BMisc 1.3.1

CRAN release: 2018-08-15

  • Update rhs.vars to fix bug related to formulas like y~x+I(x^2)

  • Update toformula to allow for no right hand side variables

BMisc 1.3.0

CRAN release: 2018-07-16

  • Added function to take distribution functions (ecdf objects) and turn them into step functions for the quantiles.

  • Improved code for working with formulas

BMisc 1.2.0

CRAN release: 2018-02-27

  • Added function for obtaining a subsample of a panel data set

BMisc 1.1.0

  • Added function addCovToFormla which adds covariate(s) to a particular formula

BMisc 1.0.1

CRAN release: 2017-06-14

  • Removed dependency on qte package