Changes in version 0.1.6 (2026-07-06)                  

CRAN compliance

  - All packages listed under Suggests are now used conditionally, as
    required by "Writing R Extensions". Every function that relies on a
    suggested package (bnlearn, sensemakr, CausalImpact, vars,
    RTransferEntropy, MASS, openxlsx) now checks for it with
    requireNamespace() and raises an informative error if it is missing.
  - All \donttest examples that exercise a suggested package are now
    wrapped in if (requireNamespace(<pkg>, quietly = TRUE)) (or, for the
    Stan-based functions, if (interactive() &&
    requireNamespace("cmdstanr"))), so they are skipped under
    _R_CHECK_DEPENDS_ONLY_=true instead of failing. This resolves the
    CRAN check failure in the run_hmm example.
  - run_hmm() no longer depends on depmixS4 (which was archived from
    CRAN on 2026-07-04). The bivariate Poisson HMM is now fitted by a
    self-contained base-R implementation of the Baum-Welch (EM)
    algorithm with a numerically stable log-space forward-backward pass,
    multi-start restarts, and Viterbi decoding. depmixS4 has been
    dropped from Suggests.

Robustness improvements

  - Output directories are now explicit function arguments (dir_csv,
    dir_out, dir_figs) instead of global variables read from the
    caller's environment. They default to NULL, in which case the
    functions no longer write to disk. Affected functions: run_hmm(),
    run_dbn(), run_varx(), run_sensemakr(), run_synth_bsts(),
    run_transfer_entropy(), run_eba(), rolling_oos().
  - run_eba() now takes control_combos as an explicit argument instead
    of reading it from the global environment.
  - run_hmm() now calls depmixS4::fit() explicitly, so it works without
    attaching depmixS4 to the search path.
  - run_varx() now coerces its input to a data.table internally, so it
    accepts a plain data.frame.
  - Fixed a latent bug in smoketest_floor_elpd_invariance() that called
    a non-existent fit_one_internal(); it now calls fit_one().
  - Removed a duplicate definition of export_results_xlsx() that
    shadowed the fully featured implementation.
  - Dropped unused ggplot2 and bayesplot entries from Suggests.

                        Changes in version 0.1.0                        

  - Initial package release.
  - Bivariate hurdle model implementation.
  - Time-series analysis functions.