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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

hilldiv3 3.1.0.9000 (unreleased)

  • Added hillcontrib() to rank taxa or named sets by their additive contributions to pairwise or collective Hill dissimilarity. It supports neutral, phylogenetic and functional diversity and all four dissimilarity metrics. Collective comparisons can be run for named groups of samples.
  • Functional partitioning now handles an all-zero distance matrix through the shared functional-similarity kernel.
  • Expanded the gut microbiome vignette with MAG power-sum shares and an illustrated example of MAG contributions to dissimilarity.

hilldiv3 3.1.0

  • Added hillshare() to allocate neutral, phylogenetic and functional Hill power-sum weight to individual taxa or named sets. Its first allocation method is "qpower"; empty samples have undefined (NA) shares.
  • Functional Hill numbers now handle all-zero distance matrices and empty samples consistently: identical taxa have diversity 1, and empty samples have diversity 0.

hilldiv3 3.0.1

  • Added contributing guidelines (CONTRIBUTING.md), a code of conduct, issue templates, citation metadata (CITATION.cff) and the full GPL-3 licence text, and a Journal of Open Source Software paper (paper/).
  • Breaking: the out = "matrix" form of the per-sample functions (hilldiv(), hillprof(), hilleven()) now returns samples in rows and diversity orders (q0, q1, …) in columns, instead of the previous orders-in-rows/samples-in-columns layout. This matches the usual observations-in-rows convention and joins cleanly with per-sample metadata. Code that indexed these matrices by ["q0", ] should switch to [, "q0"] (or transpose). The component/metric matrices from hillpart(), hilldiss() and hillred() are unchanged.
  • hilldiv() and friends now accept count tables whose first column holds taxa names: a leading non-numeric column is automatically promoted to row names (instead of failing with “Count data must be numeric”). Any other non-numeric column raises a clear error asking the user to fix the input.
  • Verbose output now reports the number of taxa and samples being analysed.

hilldiv3 3.0.0

CRAN release: 2026-10-06

First published on CRAN on 6 October 2026.

Complete redesign of the package built on a tested, isolated compute engine.

Architecture

  • Math separated into an internal, unit-tested engine (hill_alpha(), hill_partition(), hill_beta_to_dissim()); the user-facing hill* functions are thin wrappers around it.
  • Single validation/alignment layer (prep_data()) that checks names with setequal() and reorders data to match the tree/distance matrix, fixing the silent-misalignment behaviour of hilldiv2.
  • New as_hill_input() adapter accepting matrices, data frames, tibbles, phyloseq and TreeSummarizedExperiment objects.
  • Fast ape-based post-order tree traversal replaces geiger::tips().

New features

  • hillprof() — diversity profiles across a sweep of q values.
  • hilleven() — evenness from Hill numbers.
  • Real match_data() helper (previously only referenced in the docs).
  • Tidy output by default. hilldiv(), hillpart(), hilldiss(), hillsim(), hilleven(), hillprof() and hillred() now return long-format data.frames with print(), plot() and (when ggplot2 is installed) autoplot() methods. Pass out = "matrix" for the legacy shape.
  • Explicit type argument — type = c("auto", "neutral", "phylogenetic", "functional") on every entry point; "auto" keeps input-based detection, an explicit value asserts and validates the diversity type.
  • hillpair() computes the type-specific structure once over all samples and reuses it per pair (no more full re-partition per pair), and reports a progressr bar when available.
  • Bundled, documented example data: gut_counts, gut_tree, gut_traits.
  • reference argument on hilldiv() — reference = c("pool", "sample") selects the reference tree depth for phylogenetic Hill numbers. "pool" (default) reads every sample at one common depth T = mean(T_j) so values are mutually comparable (hilldiv2’s multi behaviour); "sample" reads each sample at its own depth T_j. The two coincide on ultrametric trees. The option is deliberately absent from hillpart(), where T is fixed at the Chiu et al. (2014) mean per-sample depth — the unique value for which gamma / alpha is a valid decomposition with beta in [1, N].

Bug fixes

  • Phylogenetic hilldiv() alpha corrected. The per-sample phylogenetic Hill number previously raised branch length L_i to the power q along with abundance ((L_i a_i / T)^q), which matched no standard quantity and disagreed with the partition engine. Branch length is now a linear weight ((L_i / T) a_i^q, Chao et al. 2010), so q = 0 recovers Faith’s PD / T and the per-sample value matches hillpart() alpha at a single sample. This changes phylogenetic hilldiv() and hillprof() outputs relative to earlier 3.0.0 development snapshots.

Infrastructure

  • Added test-coverage (Codecov) and lint (lintr) GitHub Actions workflows.
  • Added golden-value tests cross-checking the engine against vegan and hand-computed constants, plus edge cases (single taxon, empty sample, q = 1).

Compatibility