NEWS

bamp 2.1.7

Effects (age, period, cohort) are now computed automatically inside bamp() and stored in the returned object (model$effects), so a separate call to effects.apc() is no longer needed for the default median summary.
Fixed bug in effects.apc(): cache check was looking for x$effect (singular) instead of x$effects (plural), and referenced an undefined variable in the cache condition.
MCMC chains now use warm starts: on a restart the previous sample values are used as initial values, reducing burn-in time for automatic convergence checking. First-run behaviour is unchanged.

Fixed bug in cohort heterogeneity hyperparameter check (cohort="rw2+het" was not recognized correctly).
Fixed typo in period_covariate handling that silently prevented vector coercion.
Fixed checkConvergence(): cohort convergence check used age hyperparameter instead of cohort hyperparameter.
Fixed hyperparameter display in checkConvergence() info output.
Fixed memory leaks in C++ MCMC code (raw pointer allocations per iteration).
Fixed GetRNGstate/PutRNGstate pairing in random number generation.
Added Cholesky decomposition error check with informative message.
Replaced fork-based mclapply with socket-based makeCluster/parLapply for reliable parallel execution on all platforms, including macOS GUI environments (RStudio). Falls back to sequential if cluster setup fails.
MCMC chains that fail due to numerical errors are now discarded cleanly instead of continuing with corrupted values.
Cholesky decomposition now recovers from non-positive-definite precision matrices (common with RW2 priors during tuning) by adding increasing diagonal regularization and retrying, instead of aborting the chain.
Added unit tests.
Updated CITATION to use bibentry().

Better default settings (burn in times ten, more informative prior for age).
Add warnings for failed convergence checks and removed chains in bamp(), including suggestions.
Add warnings for failed convergence checks in print.apc().
Fixed unwanted doubling of MCMC when verbose=2.