The vcov() method for aggregate indexes now returns a matrix of variances instead of an array of covariances, as the covariances are usually misleading and unnecessary. In most cases elemental aggregates are sampled independently, in which case the covariances should be 0. This is not backwards compatible.
The vcov() method for aggregate indexes is now much faster. The options for parallel computing have been removed, as they’re unlikely to be useful for even large indexes.
The head() and tail() methods for index objects now return an index object instead of a matrix, as documented.
Added an as.matrix() method for pias objects. This makes it easy to aggregate a price index as a matrix operation; just matrix multiply the aggregation matrix with the elemental indexes.
Added an as.data.frame() method for pias objects. This is useful for writing price-updated weights with, e.g., write.csv().
Added an as_index() method for data frames. This is faster and simpler than turning a data frame into an index with elemental_index(df$value, df$period, df$level).
The chain argument found in some of the methods for elemental_index() and as_index() to mark an index as chainable has been replaced by the more descriptive chainable argument. Partial matching of argument names means this is backwards compatible.
The price_relative() function no longer uses gpindex::back_price(), as this function is deprecated. This change will remove the harmless deprecation warning when using an older version of piar with a newer version of gpindex.
is_chain_index() function is now deprecated, and replaced with the is_chainable_index() function.