NEWS.md

In earthUI: Interactive 'shiny' GUI for the 'earth' Package

earthUI 0.1.3

Locale & Regional Settings

• Country-based locale system with 31 country presets controlling CSV separator, decimal mark, thousands separator, date format ordering, and paper size.
• Country dropdown with individual override dropdowns for Paper, CSV sep, Decimal, and Date format.
• Global locale defaults saved via "Save as my default" (SQLite persistence), independent of per-file settings.
• Number formatting on plot axes and slope labels adapts to locale (e.g., German uses period thousands, Finnish uses space, Swiss uses apostrophe).
• CSV import uses locale-aware separator and decimal mark.
• PDF reports respect locale paper size (Letter or A4).
• Date parsing tries locale-preferred format order first (MDY for US, DMY for Europe, YMD for Sweden/Japan).
• Currency symbols removed from all outputs --- earthUI is now currency-agnostic.

earthUI 0.1.2

Sales Comparison Grid (Appraisal Mode)

• New Sales Comparison Grid output for appraisal workflows — generates multi-sheet Excel workbooks with subject and up to 30 comps (3 per sheet).
• Auto-recommended comp selection based on gross adjustment percentage (< 25%), sorted by gross adjustment.
• Sale Price / Concessions / Net SP row with formula-based Net SP.
• Grouped rows for Location (longitude, latitude, area), Site Size (lot_size, site_dimensions), and Age (actual_age, effective_age) with combined value contributions.
• CQA|Residual row with formula-based remaining residual that auto-decreases as the appraiser fills in residual feature breakdowns.
• Adjusted Sale Price formula: Net SP + all adjustments above Total VC row.
• Sheet protection with locked formulas and data cells; unlocked residual feature input cells for appraiser entry.
• Haversine-based subject proximity calculation for each comp.

Special Column Types

• Added new special column types: dom, concessions, actual_age, effective_age, lot_size, site_dimensions, area.
• Special type badges displayed next to variable names in predictor settings.
• Single-assignment enforcement: only one column per special type (except display_only which allows multiple).

Intermediate Output Improvements

• Ranking columns (residual_sf, cqa_sf, residual, cqa) moved to leftmost position in the Step 6 download for easier CQA evaluation.
• Excel number formatting: residual_sf as currency (2 dp), residual as currency (0 dp), cqa_sf and cqa as numeric (2 dp).

UI Improvements

• Fit Earth Model button always visible (no longer inside collapsible section).
• Minimum sidebar width (500px) to prevent predictor settings column overlap.
• Wider notification popups (450px) with word-wrapping for long file paths.

Bug Fixes

• Cross-validated R-squared now uses model$cv.rsq directly instead of parsing cv.rsq.tab.

earthUI 0.1.0

Core

• Shiny GUI for interactive earth (MARS) model building.
• Data import from CSV and Excel files with automatic snake_case column naming.
• Variable configuration with include, factor, and linear-only controls.
• Full exposure of all earth() parameters through the GUI with inline help popovers.
• Cross-validation automatically enabled for interaction and variance models.
• Settings persistence via localStorage across browser sessions.
• Light/dark mode toggle.

Allowed Interactions

• Allowed interaction matrix for constraining degree >= 2 models.
• CSS sticky headers — top row and left column stay visible while scrolling.
• Click variable name to toggle all its interactions (symmetric toggle).
• Allow All / Clear All buttons.

Multivariate Models

• Multi-response model support: select multiple target variables to fit cbind() earth models.
• Per-response equation display, summary metrics, and ANOVA decomposition.
• All plot functions accept response_idx to select which response to visualize.
• Observation weights via the weights parameter in fit_earth().

Model Fitting

• Asynchronous background fitting via callr::r_bg() with real-time trace display and elapsed timer.
• Automatic nfold/ncross adjustment for variance models.
• Synchronous fallback when callr is unavailable.

Visualization

• Variable importance bar charts.
• Per-variable contribution plots with piecewise-linear slope labels and knot markers.
• g-function plots: 1D line, interactive 3D surface (plotly), static 3D perspective (persp()), and filled contour.
• Correlation matrix heatmap.
• Diagnostic plots: residuals vs fitted, Q-Q, actual vs predicted.
• Adaptive axis formatting — 3 decimal places for lat/long-scale data, commas for large values.
• Slope labels scaled to axis range (/0.001 for small-range, /unit for large-range variables).

Model Equation

• LaTeX equation with g-function notation rendered via MathJax in the app and native LaTeX in PDF reports.
• Full LaTeX special character escaping (_, $, %, &, #).

Report Export

• Publication-quality HTML, PDF, and Word reports via Quarto.
• Both 3D perspective and contour plots for degree-2 groups in static reports.
• Earth model summary, ANOVA decomposition, and raw earth output sections.

earthUI documentation built on March 26, 2026, 1:07 a.m.