statistics-1.9.0

Summary of important user-visible changes for statistics 1.9.0:

Important Notice:

1. Minimum datatypes package version required is now 1.3.3.
2. The 29 probability distribution classes have moved into the prob namespace; the flat class names are gone, so prob.NormalDistribution replaces NormalDistribution. makedist, fitdist, cdf, pdf, icdf, random and mle take the distribution's name and are unaffected.
3. The generalized additive model classes now fit boosted trees by default, as MATLAB does; the spline engine remains available as 'FitMethod', 'splines'.
4. fitcnet and fitrnet now default to the LBFGS solver, and fitcnet to rectified hidden layers and a softmax output, so every default fit returns different weights.
5. Models of the compact classes saved by an earlier version no longer load and must be re-saved from the model they were compacted from.
6. Incompatibility with the nan and tablicious packages.

This is a major release bundling the GSoC 2026 contributions (#265, #266) and extensive MATLAB-parity work, which would not have happened without the help of Pantelis Perakakis and Collin MacDonald to whom I extend my gratitude. Neither wrote a line of code, yet both made this work possible in ways the commit log cannot show.

113 new functions and classes, and hopefully the last release to make breaking changes.

New in this release:

• Supervised learning: fitclinear, fitrlinear, fitckernel, fitrkernel, fitrgp, fitrsvm, fitrnet, fitcnb, with their model classes and their compact and cross-validated counterparts.
• Regression: fitglm, fitnlm, fitlme, fitlmematrix, fitglme, mvregress, stepwiselm, stepwiseglm, lasso, lassoglm, robustfit, nlinfit, coxphfit, fitcox.
• Clustering and anomaly detection: dbscan, kmedoids, spectralcluster, iforest, lof, ocsvm, robustcov.
• Dimensionality reduction: tsne, rica, sparsefilt, nnmf, mdscale, ppca, rotatefactors.
• Distributions: the stable distribution family, KernelDistribution, paretotails, copulafit, copulaparam, copulastat, mlecov.
• Hypothesis testing: ansaribradley, dwtest, jbtest, lillietest.
• Plotting: andrewsplot, biplot, ecdfhist, glyphplot, gplotmatrix, parallelcoords, probplot, scatterhist.
• Also ksdensity, mvksdensity, perfcurve, rocmetrics, partialcorr, partialcorri, statset, statget, hmmdecode, hmmtrain, and the nan* family completed with nanvar, nanstd, nanmedian and nancov.

Documentation:

• The package now ships doc/statistics.qch, so its documentation is also available in the Documentation tab of Octave's GUI once the package is loaded.

Backward compatibility notice!
Beyond the five items above, this release changes behaviour that working code may depend on in 40 documented cases, and mvtcdfqmc is no longer a public function. Each is listed in the NEWS file under Breaking changes, saying what breaks and what to write instead. Read it before upgrading.