CHANGES IN VERSION 2.4.0 ------------------------ NEW FEATURES o New function spliceVariants for detecting alternative exon usage from exon-level count data. o A choice of rejection regions is now implemented for exactTest, and the default is changed from one based on small probabilities to one based on doubling the smaller of the tail probabilities. This gives better results than the original conditional test when the dispersion is large (especially > 1). A Beta distribution approximation to the tail probability is also implemented when the counts are large, making exactTest() much faster and less memory hungry. o estimateTagwiseDisp now includes an abundance trend on the dispersions by default. o exactTest now uses tagwise.dispersion by default if found in the object. o estimateCRDisp is removed. It is now replaced by estimateGLMCommonDisp, estimateGLMTrendedDisp and estimateGLMTagwiseDisp. o Changes to glmFit so that it automatically detects dispersion estimates if in data object. It uses tagwise if available, then trended, then common. o Add getPriorN() to calculate the weight given to the common parameter likelihood in order to smooth (or stabilize) the dispersion estimates. Used as default for estimateTagwiseDisp and estimateGLMTagwiseDisp. o New function cutWithMinN used in binning methods. o glmFit now S3 generic function, and glmFit has new method argument specifying fitting algorithm. o DGEGLM objects now subsettable. o plotMDS.dge is retired, instead a DGEList method is now defined for plotMDS in the limma package. One advantage is that the plot can be repeated with different graphical parameters without recomputing the distances. The MDS method is also now much faster. o Add as.data.frame method for TopTags objects. o New function cpm to calculate counts per million conveniently. o Adding args to dispCoxReidInterpolateTagwise to give more access to tuning parameters. o estimateGLMTagwiseDisp now uses trended.dispersion by default if trended.dispersion is found. o Change to glmLRT to ensure character coefficient argument will work. o Change to maPlot so that any really extreme logFCs are brought back to a more reasonable scale. o estimateGLMCommonDisp now returns NA when there are no residual df rather than returning dispersion of zero. o The trend computation of the local common likelihood in dispCoxReidInterpolateTagwise is now based on moving averages rather than lowess. o Changes to binGLMDispersion to allow trended dispersion for data sets with small numbers of genes, but with extra warnings. BUG FIXES o dispDeviance and dispPearson now give graceful estimates and messages when the dispersion is outside the specified interval. o Bug fix to mglmOneWay, which was confusing parametrizations when the design matrix included negative values. o mglmOneWay (and hence glmFit) no longer produces NA coefficients when some of the fitted values were exactly zero. o Changes to offset behaviour in estimateGLMCommonDisp, estimateGLMTrendedDisp and estimateGLMTagwiseDisp to fix bug. Changes to several other functions on the way to fixing bugs when computing dispersions in data sets with genes that have all zero counts. o Bug fix to mglmSimple with matrix offset. o Bug fix to adjustedProfLik when there are fitted values exactly at zero for one or more groups.