[R] New version of package mda

[Trevor Hastie]

mda 0.1-4 is on CRAN

Many thanks to Friedrich Leisch, Kurt Hornik and Brian Ripley for  
their early work in porting the mda package
into R, and to Kurt for maintaining the package. I have "taken back"  
mda and will maintain it from now on.

The package fits flexible, penalized and mixture discriminant models.  
For a brief introduction, see Sections 12.4-7 of "Elements of  
Statistical Learning" (first or second edition).

This new version has documentation for the plot method, and has  
improved functionality for the regression method "gen.ridge". The  
"laplacian" penalty works and is documented, for implementing  
penalized discriminant analysis via the function fda(). The mars  
function has not changed, but users are encouraged to use the "earth"  
package of Stephen Milborrow, which fits "MARS" models; in particular,  
earth works as a regression method for fda() and mda().


Trevor Hastie