NEWS.md

In IntervalQuestionStat: Tools to Deal with Interval-Valued Responses in Questionnaires

NEWS about the IntervalQuestionStat package for R

IntervalQuestionStat 0.2.0

Breaking changes

• IntervalData class prototype has been removed since, as it is indicated on the help page of setClass() function, these arguments are currently allowed, but either they are unlikely to be useful or there are modern alternatives that are preferred. This change motivates the simplification of distance() function by removing one of its checks.

• IntervalData class representation has been changed to slots argument since, as it is indicated on the help page of setClass() function, these arguments are deprecated from version 3.0.0 of R and should be avoided.

• IntervalData, IntervalList, and IntervalMatrix classes validity has been changed to setValidity since, as it is indicated on the help page of setClass() function, these arguments are currently allowed, but either they are unlikely to be useful or there are modern alternatives that are preferred.

• IntervalList and IntervalMatrix classes have been redefined in order to reduce the package's computational weight. In the previous version, their unique slot .Data was created by default as an object of class list or matrix, respectively, containing several IntervalData instances. Then, some of list or matrix methods were inherited by IntervalList and IntervalMatrix objects. Now, these two classes have two slots, named mid and spr, containing numeric vectors or matrix objects with the mid-points and the spreads of the intervals. It should be remarked that with this new implementation no list or matrix methods are inherited by IntervalList and IntervalMatrix objects.

• age variable from lackinfo data set has been removed. Therefore, the examples and tests that use this data have been modified in order to select the correct variables.

• ivd2likert() and ivd2vas() functions have been renamed as ivs2likert() and ivs2vas(), respectively.

• ivd argument in cronbach() function has been renamed as ivs.

• simulIVS() returns a data.frame object, not a matrix as in the previous package's version.

• a1 and a2 arguments in IntervalData() function are now forced to be single real numbers stored as unique numeric objects.

• theta argument in cov(), cronbach(), distance(), ivs2likert(), and var() functions is now forced to be a single positive real number stored as a unique numeric object.

• bounds and mid arguments in plot() function's methods are now forced to be single logical objects.

• ivs argument in cronbach() function is now forced to be a single logical object.

• k argument in ivs2likert() function is now forced to be a single positive integer number stored as a unique numeric object.

• minimum and maximum arguments in ivs2likert() and simulIVS() functions are now forced to be single real numbers stored as single numeric objects.

• n and k arguments in simulIVS() function are now forced to be single positive integer numbers stored as single numeric objects.

• w1, w2, and w3 arguments in simulIVS() function are now forced to be single real numbers in [0, 1] stored as single numeric objects.

• p and q arguments in simulIVS() function are now forced to be single non-negative real numbers stored as single numeric objects.

• object argument in as.IntervalData() function is now forced to be a single real number stored as a unique numeric value.

• c() function's methods have been redefined in a simpler way.

New features

• DESCRIPTION file was updated as follows:
• Description field was include a more detailed explanation of package's functionality and it also incorporates the links to the web pages of the two Research Groups, whose publications and investigations inspire the development of this package.
• ORCID numbers from authors were added on Authors@R: and Author fields.
• BugReports, URL, Imports and Suggests fields were added.
• RoxygenNote field was updated to 7.2.1.
• Date field was removed as it was suggested from pkgcheck() function from the pkgcheck package.
• The methods, grDevices, graphic, and stats packages were moved from Depends field to Imports one.

• The testthat and vdiffr packages were added on Suggests field.

• Due to the new definition of IntervalList and IntervalMatrix classes, it was necessary to create some new methods in order to calculate these objects sizes. In particular, length() function method was developed for IntervalList objects and dim(), ncol(), and nrow() methods were defined for IntervalMatrix objects.

• In order to provide customized and controlled access to the classes slots, two accessor functions, named mid() and spr(), were created. They return the information stored on mid and spr slots, respectively. They are a user-friendly alternative to the @ accessor, since it does not force others to know the implementation details. Some replacement methods for these slots were defined through mid<- and "spr<-" commands.

• A new virtual class, named IntervalDataOrIntervalList, was created as the union of IntervalData and IntervalList classes only for internal purposes such as defining method signatures when several objects of these two classes are supplied.

• A new virtual class, named IntervalListOrIntervalMatrix, was created as the union of IntervalList and IntervalMatrix classes only for internal purposes such as defining method signatures when several objects of these two classes are supplied.

• The c() function's methods for combining IntervalData and IntervalList instances was updated to the new signature IntervalDataOrIntervalList.

• The rbind() and cbind() functions were created in order to combine IntervalList and IntervalMatrix instances by rows and columns, respectively, through the new signature IntervalListOrIntervalMatrix.

• The arithmetic methods were extended to the IntervalList and IntervalMatrix classes by allowing to carry out the implemented operations element by element.

• The simulIVS function's code was revised in order to reduce its execution time.

• The extract methods were modified in order to allow to use negative integers for indicating the elements to leave out of the selection. Some methods were defined in order to allow to replace parts of IntervalList and IntervalMatrix objects too. In particular, [<- and [[<- commands were included.

• Tests for code lines were developed though the testthat and vdiffr (used specifically for plot methods) packages. These tests provide a 100% coverage as it was calculated by package_coverage() function from covr package.

• Some good practice comments given by pkgcheck() function from the pkgcheck package motivated the following changes in the previous code:

• All code lines were adjusted in order to not exceed the common length of 80 characters.
• Code expressions like 1:nrow(data), 1:length(x), ... were avoided. Function seq_len() was used instead.
• Cyclomatic complexity of the objects in this package was reduced by creating some subfunctions in order to do some repeated checks. In particular, is_single_positive_integer(), is_single_positive_real_number(), is_single_real_number(), and is_single_proportion were created for this purpose.

• Calls to sapply() functions were avoided. Function vapply was used instead.

• Some function's documentations were corrected and improved, including more detailed examples.

• DOIs were added to references (whenever they were found).

• Both README.md and NEWS.md files were also incorporated to the package.

• A logo for the IntervalQuestionStat package was also designed and included in the man/figures/ directory.

Bug fixes

• Colors were not used in the correct way in plot() function's methods defined for IntervalData and IntervalList objects, specially when the intervals lower and upper bounds or their mid-points were remarked. Therefore, this bug was fixed by changing the expression dotarguments <- match.call(expand.dots = FALSE)$... to dotarguments <- list(...).

• Some default main and axis labels were misspelled in plot() function's methods, so they were corrected.

• The xaxt and yaxt arguments from plot() function's method for signature IntervalData,IntervalData were removed so the axis numbers are shown.

IntervalQuestionStat 0.1.0

Initial release of the IntervalQuestionStat package on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).

IntervalQuestionStat documentation built on Nov. 1, 2022, 5:06 p.m.