[R-pkgs] New version 0.9-7 of lars package

[Trevor Hastie]

I uploaded a new version of the lars package to CRAN,
which incorporates some nontrivial changes.

1) lars now has normalize and intercept options, both defaulted to TRUE,
which means the variables are scaled to have unit euclidean norm, and
an intercept is included in the model. Either or both can be set to FALSE.

2) lars has an additional type = "stepwise" option;
    now the list is type=c("lasso", "lar", "forward.stagewise","stepwise")
This was included because it is trivial to implement, and useful for 
comparisons.
"Stepwise" is a version of forward stepwise regression, where the 
variable to
enter is the one most correlated with the residuals. This is not 
necessarily the
same as the forward stepwise implemented as part of step() in R, where the
variable entered is the one that, when included, reduces the RSS the most.

3) a method for summary() has been included, which gives an anova-type 
summary
of the sequence of steps.

4) The plot method for lars defaults to plotting coefficients against 
the relative
L1 norm of the coefficients. This was not done correctly in general for 
type "lar"
and "forward.stagewise", since the L1 norm does not change smoothly if
coefficients pass through zero. This has been fixed.

5) A smalll number of of other changes have been made, some in response 
to email
messages from users.
 
Thanks to Yann-Ael Le Borgne for pointing out the problem in (4) and 
proposing
a solution, and to Lukas Meier for reporting some bugs. Please let me 
know of any
new problems, or old ones not yet repaired.

Trevor Hastie

--------------------------------------------------------------------
  Trevor Hastie                                  hastie at stanford.edu
  Professor & Chair, Department of Statistics, Stanford University
  Phone: (650) 725-2231 (Statistics)	         Fax: (650) 725-8977
	 (650) 498-5233 (Biostatistics)		 Fax: (650) 725-6951
  URL: http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~hastie
  address: room 104, Department of Statistics, Sequoia Hall
	          390 Serra Mall, Stanford University, CA 94305-4065