piar 0.7.0

Significant changes

• Some arguments for elemental_index(), as_index(), aggregate(index), mean(index), vcov(index), update(aggregation_structure), and weights(aggregation_structure) now need to be named (e.g., na.rm, contrib). This helps to unify the signatures for several functions that had similar arguments in different positions. In all cases these are arguments that are not near the beginning of the function and should have probably been named anyways.

• There are several bug fixes in this version that make non-backwards compatible changes.

Improvements

• Added examples for finding imputed index values to the vignette.

• contrib() gets a new argument period to control which time periods get included in the contributions matrix (as documented).

• contrib() gets a new argument pad to control how the contributions matrix is padded when products differ over time.

• Added is.na() and anyNA() methods to find missing values in an index object.

• index[i] <- value now works when i is a matrix.

• mean() gets a new argument contrib to control if product contributions are aggregated over subperiods.

• Added a split() method for index objects.

• levels(aggregation_structure) now returns a list of levels to denote the position of each level in the hierarchy. Use unlist() to get the old behavior.

Bug fixes

• The default for ea_only has changed to TRUE when calling weights(aggregation_structure) to fix a bug with the replacement method.

• Replacing an index value with index[] <- value when value is also an index object now works correctly when value is recycled.

• Setting stringsAsFactors = TRUE in as.data.frame(index) now keeps the correct ordering of the factor levels.

• mean(index) no longer returns an aggregate index when r differs from that used to make index.

Deprecations

• The cols argument for as_index() is deprecated and will be removed in a future version.

piar 0.6.0

Significant changes

• The [[ method for index objects has been removed as it created unexpected problems for little gain. as.matrix(index)[[1, 1]] is a more explicit and flexible way to get the same behavior as index[[1, 1]].

• aggregation_structure() now orders the levels of an aggregation according to the order they appear in the data. Previously the levels were ordered lexicographically, except for the elemental aggregates. This can affect the order in which index values appear for an aggregate index.

There are a number of changes to the way product names are handled when making an index and extracting percent-change contributions.

• Names for price relatives now need to be unique within a time period for elemental_index(). The previous (undocumented) behavior was to only require that names be unique within a time period and elemental aggregate. This implies two non-backward compatible changes.

  • The default product names for elemental_index() now include the name of the elemental aggregate to conform to the above requirement.

  • Percent-change contributions from contrib() have simplified row names, as there is now no need to include index-level names to make product names unique.

• contrib() now always returns a matrix. Previously it would return NULL if there were no contributions for each level of the index.

• Rows for the contributions matrix are ordered according to product names so that they have a consistent ordering.

Improvements

• Printing an index gives a textual description in addition to the matrix of index values. Printing an aggregation structure now gives a description and tabular representation instead of a list.

• There are now methods to set the levels and time periods of an index.

• Methods for index objects are now faster for larger indexes.

• aggregate() gains a new argument contrib that controls if percent-change contributions for elemental indexes are aggregated. The default maintains the current behavior of aggregating contributions if there are any.

• The class names for index objects have changed to fix a name conflict with Matrix. This means it's now possible to use rsmatrix with piar.

• The as.matrix() method for aggregation structures gains a new argument sparse. If sparse = TRUE then the aggregation matrix is a sparse, rather than dense, matrix. This option can also be used in the vcov() method for aggregate price indexes to improve performance for large indexes.

• Added the carry_backwards() function to do carry backwards (as opposed to carry forwards) imputation.

Bug fixes

• Viewing index objects in the RStudio viewer longer gives an error.

• is_direct_index() is now exported.

• Replacing index values for an aggregate index no longer returns an aggregate index, as it may not be consistent in aggregation.

• Stacking two indexes now only returns an aggregate index if both indexes are themselves aggregate indexes. Previously it was possible to stack an aggregate index with a non-aggregate index to produce an aggregate index that was not consistent in aggregation.

piar 0.5.0

Significant changes

• piar now requires R >= 4.0.

• is_chain_index() has been removed; use is_chainable_index() instead.

• The first argument to elemental_index() is now x, not rel, to be consistent with the rest of the functions. Similarly, the first argument for expand_classification() is now x, not class.

New features

• New functions as_aggregation_structure() and is_aggregation_structure() to coerce (usually) tabular data for aggregation weights into an aggregation structure, and test if an object is an aggregation structure.

• A method for [[ for index objects to extract or replace a single index value.

• The weights for an aggregation structure can be replace with weights(pias) <- vector.

Improvements

• The levels() replacement function now gives an error for indexes and aggregation structures, rather than adding a levels attribute that does nothing.

• The width argument for expand_classification() now recycles a single value.

• Major overhaul of the documentation should make it easier to use.

• The object structure used to represent index object has been refined.

• Subscripting an index object is now much faster.

• It is now possible to update an aggregation structure with a non-aggregated index.

• Functions that accept a price index or an aggregation structure as an argument now attempt to coerce these arguments into an index object or aggregation structure object instead of throwing an error.

Bug fixes

• Fixed a bug where creating elemental indexes with missing product names could produce a contributions matrix with the wrong number of products.

• It is now possible to chain an index with only one level.

• Subscripting an index with NAs or duplicate indices is no longer allowed.