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PAST Changelog

What's new in PAST 4.0

Jan 20, 2020
  • The first 64-bit version of Past, allowing even larger data volumes
  • Google Maps and scripting disabled, hopefully to return in next version
  • Polar plot
  • Bug fix: XY graph crashed for non-numerical data values
  • Bug fix: Labels shifted vertical position when rotated
  • Bug fix: Mann-Whitney test failed for very large N (>45,000).
  • Bug fix: Normal probability plot correlation coefficient incorrect for very large N (>45,000).
  • Bug fix: Individual rarefaction crashed when restarting with window open.

New in PAST 3.25 (May 24, 2019)

  • Change point analysis for univariate and multivariate time series
  • Non-local means denoising added to “Simple smoothers”
  • Bihistogram option added to Histogram module
  • SVG export now supports “foreign” characters (e.g. Ø, ü, ô)
  • Google Maps: Quality improvement in plotting of points (symbols).
  • When plotting several bivariate regressions, the points now get distinct colors
  • CCA: Option for estimating site scores of “mystery rows” without environmental data
  • Bug fix: Column type ‘Nominal’ not read when opening a Past file
  • Bug fix, Correlation: Correlation ellipses not rendered properly in SVG for R=1 and R=-1
  • Help texts added to 12 modules

New in PAST 3.24 (Apr 1, 2019)

  • Histogram: Confidence intervals (Clopper-Pearson), and numerical output.
  • Graph and XY graph: Silhouette plot option
  • Pie chart: Support for multiple pies (columns)
  • Discriminant analysis: New option for showing matrix C or WcovC in the loadings table
  • Stratigraphic chart: Numerous improvements and bug fixes
  • Bug fix: Range of grid made more robust in Thin Plate Spline Deformation module.
  • Bug fix: Matrix plot and similar plots could get white spots after opening and closing the graph settings window
  • Help texts added to 12 modules

New in PAST 3.23 (Mar 5, 2019)

  • Network plotting
  • Common Allometric Components analysis for 3D landmarks
  • WA-PLS added to calibration methods
  • Lilliefors test added to tests for normal distribution (although inferior to Shapiro-Wilk and Anderson-Darling)
  • Confidence interval for ratios of counts (as used in some faunal indices)
  • Improved handling of missing values in Simple periodogram; FIR filter; Short time Fourier analysis; wavelet analysis.
  • Help texts added to 11 modules (to be continued in future versions)
  • Bug fix: Google Maps was not working anymore after a version compatibility problem
  • Bug fix: Highpass option in FIR filtering was not operational
  • Bug fix: Some modules crashed the program if only group columns were selected
  • Bug fix: Axis labels sometimes had excessive trailing zeroes

New in PAST 3.21 (Oct 9, 2018)

  • Plotting of user-defined lines and polygons (links) in 2D and 3D landmark PCA, landmark linear regression and thin-plate splines
  • Radar (spider) plot
  • Analytical rarefaction of Shannon’s H and Simpson’s D (no confidence intervals yet)
  • 3D scatter plot now supports the different symbols, not only dots
  • Bug fix, contingency tables; limit on table size for Fisher’s exact test was too strict
  • Bug fix: Plotting of data with extremely small maximum values (<1e-10) could crash.
  • Bug fix: Improved formatting of very small values on graph axes.
  • Bug fix: Mann-Whitney test failed for extremely large sample sizes (N>20,000)
  • Bug fix: Copy graphic button did not work in the Diversity menu Bug fix: No colour legend displayed for bivariate linear regression on multiple columns

New in PAST 3.20 (Apr 16, 2018)

  • Wavelet analysis for time series with unequal spacing (Weighted Wavelet Z-transform)
  • CABFAC factor analysis of ecological data, with calibration (environmental reconstruction)
  • Correlation length analysis for point patterns (alternative to Ripley’s K)
  • Minimal Spanning Tree analysis for point patterns (alternative to Nearest Neighbours)
  • Linear regression of 3D landmarks, with 3D visualization
  • Ctrl-key shortcuts changed to Cmd-key on Mac
  • Option for colour coding of third variate in bubble plot
  • Option to set number of displayed decimals in the spreadsheet
  • Improved clipping of plots to graphics window
  • Improved XY plot for multiple XY graphs (pairs of columns can be given colours and symbols)
  • Numerical output added to normal probability plot
  • Bug fix: Incorrect scaling of Moran’s I (spatial autocorrelation)
  • Bug fix: Anderson-Darling two-sample test was incorrect for N>650
  • Bug fix: Kruskal-Wallis test did not handle missing data correctly
  • Bug fix: Export of 95% ellipses to PDF was inaccurate

New in PAST 3.19 (Mar 1, 2018)

  • Random-effects ANOVA, one-way and two-way, with variance components
  • Prais-Winsten linear regression for data with serially correlated residuals
  • Violin plot (in box plot module)
  • Box plot: Option for “notches” (confidence interval for median)
  • Box plot: Default quartile method changed to “Interpolation”
  • Nonlinear fit: Option for forcing the constant term to zero.
  • t test and F test: Reporting of critical value of the test statistic
  • Diversity indices: Option for “unbiased” versions of Simpson and Shannon-Wiener
  • New “Recover windows” button for those disappearing windows (old bug)
  • Rose plot: Visual improvements
  • Mosaic plot: Option to hide zero cells
  • Observed S added to Quadrat richness
  • Normal probability plot now accepts several samples (columns)
  • Bug fix: Formatting of individual rarefaction table when error bar bars not included
  • Bug fix: Copy button in Anderson-Darling test did not work
  • Bug fix: y=0 values were not accepted for several functions in nonlinear fit
  • Small quality improvements in SVG and PDF export

New in PAST 3.18 (Jan 17, 2018)

  • Anderson-Darling test for equal distributions
  • Density plot in ternary diagram
  • Row normalize length (Transform menu)
  • Permutation tests for covariances in PLS
  • Savitzky-Golay method added to Simple smoothers
  • RASC: Added variance analysis (deviation from line of correlation)
  • Transform landmarks: Rotate point cloud by arbitrary angle
  • Bug fix: Paste caused freezing (bug introduced in 3.17)
  • Bug fix: Occasional freeze in contingency table analysys
  • Bug fix: Ternary diagram gridded map (4th column plot) clipped at bottom
  • Bug fix: Moran’s I table did not update when changing bin number

New in PAST 3.17 (Nov 7, 2017)

  • Epps-Singleton test for equal distribution in two samples (alternative to Kolmogorov-Smirnov)
  • New plotting functions for correlation matrix
  • Option for Bonferroni correction in correlation table
  • Bingham test for spherical (axial) data
  • Plotting of planes as great circles in stereonet (spherical data)
  • Binomial proportion added to single-sample tests
  • van Krevelen diagram option added to XY Graph (it’s a geochemistry thing)
  • Search-replace can now search for empty cells (use search string ‘empty’)
  • Tukey’s post-hoc test for one-way ANOVA, repeated-measures ANOVA and two-way ANOVA now use a slightly more accurate approximation for the p value (Copenhaver & Holland 1988)
  • Row labels option in matrix plot
  • Bug fix: Slightly imprecise Tukey’s post-hoc Q and p values for one-way ANOVA with unequal sample sizes
  • Bug fix: Setting Row colors/symbols now honours the previous colors/symbols for the groups
  • Bug fix: PCO with degenerate data did not terminate (rare occurrence)
  • Bug fix: Slow paste of large data sets
  • Bug fix: Sorting only worked for all-numeric data
  • Bug fix: “Rearrange -> Observations to contingency table” did not delete missing values
  • Bug fix: Slightly inaccurate placement of labels in neighbour joining clustering

New in PAST 3.16 (Jul 22, 2017)

  • Package for stratigraphic charts/well plots with multiple panels and plot types
  • Hill’s equation added to Nonlinear Fitting
  • Logarithmic axes options in Graph preferences
  • Mean-and-errors plot added to Bar chart-Box plot module*
  • 3D line plot
  • 3D parametric surface plot
  • Wavelets: Option for linear scale axis. New function showing wavelet-filtered time series.
  • Paired univariate tests: Max N for exact test reduced from 25 to 22.
  • Scripting: Added functions cov, eig, linfit
  • Bug fix: Bivariate linear regression, plot of residuals did not handle missing values
  • Bug fix: 3D surface plot, vertical exaggeration did not work
  • Bug fix: Spherical data, stereoplot, density map was not quite centred on the data

New in PAST 3.15 (Mar 6, 2017)

  • Tukey’s post-hoc tests for two-way ANOVA
  • Permutation test for correlation and one-way ANOVA
  • Mosaic plot for 2-way and 3-way contingency tables
  • Stem plot
  • Distribution-free confidence intervals for stratigraphic ranges
  • Max N for wavelets increased to 130,000
  • Improved histogram plots
  • Univariate summary statistics now supports groups
  • New in Regular interpolation: Option for antialiasing (sinc) interpolation
  • Sorting now supports both types of decimal separator
  • Remove uninformative rows/columns: New option to remove constant-valued rows/columns
  • Bug fix, Ward’s method clustering: Missing data not handled properly
  • Bug fix: Setting row colors/symbols required user to select some data in addition to a group column
  • Bug fix: Scatter plot labels sometimes disappeared at edges of plot
  • Bug fix, CCA: Table of scores did not update when changing the scaling type

New in PAST 3.14 (Sep 29, 2016)

  • New: Point pattern statistics for counts in quadrats (Morisita’s index etc.)
  • New: Dunn’s post hoc test for Kruskal-Wallis (in addition to pairwise Mann-Whitney)
  • Bug fix: Export graphic file type selection did not work on Mac OSX
  • Bug fix: Search and replace stopped after first hit
  • Bug fix: Group labels not shown for small groups (n

New in PAST 3.13 (Aug 8, 2016)

  • Graphics can now be exported also in the PDF format
  • Bug fix: Excessive computation time for two-sample tests on Mac OSX
  • Bug fix: Mann-Kendall test, incorrect p values for negative trend and n

New in PAST 3.12 (Aug 8, 2016)

  • New “detach tab” button allows viewing several tabs (subwindows) at the same time
  • PCA of 3D landmarks, with 3D plotting
  • Use your own images as symbols in plots
  • Arrow plot, alternative to rose plot in circular analysis
  • Plotting of residuals in bivariate linear regression
  • Combined box and jitter plot
  • Plotting of displacement vectors in thin-plate spline deformation module
  • Contingency table analysis now includes table of residuals etc.
  • Z and t tests for probability of a single observation taken from a given sample
  • Scripting: New functions
  • Bug fix: Wrong labels on points in ternary bubble plot
  • Bug fix: Occasional error message when exiting program on Mac
  • Numerous small improvements in user interface

New in PAST 3.11 (Feb 9, 2016)

  • New: Interface to Google Maps, with plotting of points, polygons and lines (Windows only)
  • New: “Graphics basket” for managing and combining plots
  • Bug fix: Copy-paste from Excel broken under Mac OSX
  • New: Nested ANOVA
  • Improved: Selection of file format for graphics export
  • New: Support for reading RASC files
  • Small fixes in Unitary Associations
  • New: Pooled and unpooled z ratio for risk difference
  • Replace now only operates in selected cells
  • Omega2 in ANOVA set to zero if negative
  • User-defined N for Monte Carlo normality tests
  • Sinusoidal fit: Frequency resolution increased from 1/1000 to 1/500,000 of Nyquist frequency
  • Thin-plate spline deformation grid can now be extended in x and y directions
  • Scripting: New functions
  • Beta diversity now takes samples in columns, not rows, to be consistent with other modules
  • Bug fix: Bivariate linear regression: Slope was not shown in the Statistics tab for RMA or MA.
  • Bug fix: Save data in other than the Past format broken in some recent version
  • Bug fix: 3D scatter plot crashed when axis ranges were very different

New in PAST 3.10 (Nov 13, 2015)

  • Circular spectral analysis for point events
  • Equal axes button in graph preferences
  • Linear regression now reports standard error of estimate
  • Scripting: New functions, including user-defined windows (forms) with labels, buttons, edits, check boxes.
  • Increased max number of items in clustering from 900 to 3500
  • Improved algorithm for single linkage clustering of large data sets
  • Drag-drop files onto spreadsheet
  • Bug fix: Remove column or row did not work after moving it
  • Bug fix: Freeze after error condition in Evaluate expression
  • Bug fix for Mac OSX: Copy-paste into spreadsheet did not work pr

New in PAST 3.09 (Oct 12, 2015)

  • ARMA and intervention analysis for time series
  • Tests for equality of regression slopes in bivariate fitting (OLS, MA and RMA)
  • Insolation model, 250 Ma to Recent (La2004)
  • Copy-paste now works also on graphics, but only bitmap format (you must still export to SVG for publication quality)
  • New in Transform menu: Convert to ranks
  • Many new functions in the scripting language
  • Bug fix Unitary Associations: Copy-paste did not work for some output
  • Bug fix Moran’s I: Incorrect significance line for very large sample sizes
  • Bug fix: Hidden windows now pop to front when selected again from menu

New in PAST 3.08 (Aug 7, 2015)

  • Powerful scripting language, to be extended in future versions
  • Mood's median test for two samples
  • Unconditional confidence interval for individual rarefaction
  • Tamura genetic sequence distance
  • Option for using group column for box plot
  • Sorting moved to menus, and other improvements in sorting
  • Bug fix: Discriminant analysis showed blank plot for data with 3 groups
  • Bug fix: Linear regression crashed if started twice (introduced in 3.07)
  • Bug fix: Occasional crash on program exit (introduced in 3.07)
  • Bug fix: Column data type menu could get garbled (introduced in 3.07)
  • Bug fix: Small inconvenience in Row colors/symbols

New in PAST 3.07 (Aug 7, 2015)

  • 3D scatter and 4D bubble plot
  • Mann-Kendall test for trend
  • Fitting of species abundance along gradient to Gaussian packing model
  • Mantel-Cochran-Haenzsel test on multiple 2x2 contingency tables
  • Confidence interval on stratigraphic range
  • Bug fix: NMDS gave inaccurate results if environmental variables were included (introduced in 3.0)
  • Bug fix: Pairwise Mahalanobis in MANOVA gave 0 instead of 'fail' for errors
  • Bug fix: Procrustes analysis overwrote group columns
  • Bug fix: K-means clustering failed for very large numbers in input
  • Bug fix: Missing numerical output in abundance distribution modelling
  • Bug fix: Excessive computation times in some modules in Mac version
  • Save image added to surface plot
  • Improved robustness of Gaussian fit in nonlinar fit module

New in PAST 3.06 (Mar 23, 2015)

  • Clopper-Pearson confidence interval for single proportion
  • Confidence interval for many proportions, with plotting
  • Two-way repeated measures ANOVA
  • Two-way ANOSIM without replication
  • Stacked bar and area chart
  • Missing data supported in group variable for two-sample univariate tests etc.
  • Confidence interval for sample mean in one-sample t test
  • Wavelet analysis: Sampling interval can now be specified
  • Bug fix: Faulty selection of area in the spreadsheet
  • Bug fix: All columns were included in many analyses when disjunct columns were selected
  • Bug fix: Occasional crash in bivariate linear regression module
  • Bug fix: Find (search) function did not work
  • Bug fix: Garbled selection boxes in the REDFIT module
  • Bug fix: Discriminant analysis: Too many axes generated when number of groups exceeded number of variables+1
  • Bug fix: Crash in one-way ANOSIM if a group contained only one row
  • Bug fix: Landmark PCA deformation expansion factors not shown for negative PC scores

New in PAST 3.05 (Feb 2, 2015)

  • F and t tests from parameters
  • REDFIT now does not start until hitting "Compute" button
  • Raup-Crick similarity now runs 50% faster
  • User control over color map in matrix plot, gridding etc.
  • New export file formats: NTSYS, TPS, RASC, RTF
  • Sum added to univariate summary statistics
  • Bug fix: Copy data did not work in some modules.
  • Bug fix: MANOVA did not update when constraints value was changed
  • Bug fix: Crash in spherical analysis/stereoplot
  • Bug fix: PCA loadings table showed raw loadings, not correlations when correlations selected in loadings plot
  • Bug fix: Filled convex hulls had no transparency
  • Bug fix: Broken Undo after Paste
  • Bug fix: Nonlinear fit: von Bertalanffy curve correct, but small typo in the equation shown above the plot
  • Bug fix: Coefficient of variation given as 0 when mean was negative
  • Improved handling of non-integer data for the Diversity module
  • Small fix in spatial autocorrelation

New in PAST 3.04 (Oct 30, 2014)

  • One-sample t test and one-sample Wilcoxon test
  • Test for single-sample proportion
  • Pie and doughnut charts
  • Font name and size can now be changed in Graph Settings
  • Geographical distance measure
  • Date/time conversion tool
  • Edit buttons added to spreadsheet tool bar
  • Bug fix: Pearson's R correlation inaccurate for very large data sets
  • Bug fix: Graphics overwrote part of text on some computers
  • Bug fix: Concentration ellipses did not show correctly on some computers
  • Bug fix: Select all from Edit menu did not work
  • Very large SVG paths did not read correctly in Illustrator - Past now splits them into pieces

New in PAST 3.03 (Oct 6, 2014)

  • Bug fix: Insert rows and columns did not work in 3.02
  • Bug fix: File extension had to be typed in when saving graphic
  • Bug fix: Polynomial regression did not run
  • Bug fix: Crash in LOESS when bootstrapping with missing data
  • Bug fix: Symbols in plots were dashed when background grid was switched on
  • New option for showing group names in many plots
  • Added Number of polymorphic sites to Genetic sequence statistics

New in PAST 3.02 (Oct 6, 2014)

  • New module for PCA of Elliptical Fourier shapes
  • New module for size removal from distance measures (Burnaby's method etc.)
  • Box's M test for equal covariance matrices now handles more than two groups
  • Clustering results can be saved as NEXUS tree files
  • Two-sample and several-sample univariate tests: Now accepts samples either in separate columns or in a single column plus a Group column
  • Bug fix, clustering: Data were corrupted when bootstrapping repeatedly
  • Bug fix, Raup-Crick similarity: Missing data were treated incorrectly
  • Bug fix, data pasted into spreadsheet were truncated if the spreadsheet had too few rows
  • Conversion of value pairs to data matrix
  • Calculation of row percentages
  • Max number of group columns increased to six (useful for taxonomic distinctness)
  • Added arc sine (asin) to Evaluate Expression module

New in PAST 2.17 (Oct 25, 2012)

  • Two-way ANOVA without replication
  • Chao-1 species richness estimator (bias corrected)
  • Landmark 3D plot: Added animation function
  • Coefficient of variation now also available in the Univariate statistics module
  • Box-Cox: Automatic addition of constant for zero or negative values
  • Kolmogorov-Smirnov: Permutation test was inaccurate, fixed
  • Rarefaction: Option to leave out confidence intervals in banana plot
  • Cluster analysis: Dendrogram export, displacement of labels bug, fixed
  • Wavelet analysis: Color coding changed (again)
  • Fourier shape analysis: Number of harmonics increased to 30
  • Some other minor improvements

New in PAST 2.16 (Jul 11, 2012)

  • Box-Cox transformation with max likelihood estimation of lambda
  • Anderson-Darling normality test
  • Nearest neighbor point analysis: Plotting of distance histogram vs. expected distribution
  • Hangle (outline shape analysis) now includes 'Htree' fitting
  • Coefficient of variation: Now with bootstrapped confidence intervals
  • Similarity indices: Added Mixed (as available in other modules)
  • Rarefaction: Labels added for multiple-sample plot
  • User controllable range of color maps, new color maps
  • User controllable number of lines in spline deformation grids
  • Bubble plot: Option for 95% confidence ellipses
  • Rarefaction: Option to not show standard deviations
  • Improvement on number of decimals in graph axes
  • Directions: Crash for pathological input, fixed
  • Sinusoidal fitting: Crash for pathological input, fixed

New in PAST 2.15 (Jul 11, 2012)

  • Within-group and between-group centered PCA
  • Wavelets: Significance test against red-noise hypothesis
  • Kruskal-Wallis: p value was inaccurate for data with very many ties
  • Bar chart: More options for whiskers (1-sigma or 95%, stdev or stderr)
  • SIMPER: Output format made more similar to the PRIMER software
  • Linear 1 indep n dep: Now accepts zero stdev on dependents
  • CVA: Bug in biplot when only two groups present, fixed
  • Crash when viewing phylogenetic trees loaded from Nexus files: Fixed
  • Two-group multivariate permutation test now has Euclidean as default distance

New in PAST 2.14 (Jan 27, 2012)

  • Simple smoothing filters: Moving average, Gaussian, median, exponential
  • Linear regression: Breusch-Pagan test for homoskedasticity of residuals
  • Fitting points to logarithmic spiral
  • Functions to remove all-zero, all-missing or singleton rows or columns
  • Spherical (stereoplot): Calculation and plot of mean direction
  • NMDS: Numerical output of correlations with environmental variables
  • Pairwise Hotelling's test: Exact test for N

New in PAST 2.13 (Jan 27, 2012)

  • Multivariate multiple regression (several dependent and independent variables)
  • Chi-squared: Fisher's exact test now handles more than two rows (n x 2 tables)
  • Linear regression: Durbin-Watson test for autocorrelation of residuals
  • Date/time conversions
  • Polynomial fit: Table of residuals, and improved error handling
  • Short-time Fourier: Bug fix for multitaper method (introduced in 2.12)
  • SHE analysis: Improved handling of rare division-by-zero error
  • Permutation t test: Speed-up, and max permutations increased to one million
  • Matrix plot: Y axis now shows first row at top
  • PCA: Fixed rare crash in scatter plot, view numbers
  • One-way ANOVA: Copy text now copies whole window
  • Contouring: Small improvement in quality

New in PAST 2.12 (Jan 27, 2012)

  • Friedman test with pairwise Wilcoxon post-hoc
  • Spatial autocorrelation (Moran's I) for point data
  • Exact version of the Wilcoxon test for n

New in PAST 2.11 (Jan 27, 2012)

  • Polyserial correlation (for continuous vs. ordinal variates)
  • Multitaper spectral analysis
  • NMDS: Optional biplot showing correlation with environmental variables
  • One-way ANOSIM: Box plot of within- and across-group distances
  • Univariate statistics: Now with bootstrapped confidence intervals
  • Survival analysis: Now accepts one or several columns
  • All digits retained for all functions in Transform menu
  • Fixes of bugs causing rare crashes in NMDS, EDMA, reading of NTSYS files, and compare diversities.

New in PAST 2.10 (Jul 8, 2011)

  • Two-way NPMANOVA
  • SIMPER: Added Euclidean, cosine and chord distances
  • Beta diversity: Added matrix of pairwise comparisons
  • Regular interpolation: New options for point spacing and interpolation method
  • Bug fix: Displaced labels in cluster analysis (introduced in 2.09)
  • Bug fix: Stratigraphic range confidence intervals: Joint alpha was incorrect for n

New in PAST 2.09 (May 30, 2011)

  • Fourier shape analysis by the Haines & Crampton method (Hangle)
  • PCA now has three alternative methods for missing data, including iterative imputation
  • "Jitter plot" in the box plot module
  • Option to flip the axes in Graph, XY graph, XY error bar, histogram, box plot.
  • Two-group multivariate permutation test: Added Euclidean distance option
  • Bug fix: "Mixed" distance measure in cluster analysis did not handle missing data correctly
  • Mixed distance measure: Now robust to failure in one data type due to excessive missing data
  • 2D kernel density plot: Row labels and convex hulls
  • Bug fix: Histogram for several columns used only first column to set start and end values.
  • Concentration ellipses plotted for N>=3 (was N>=2)
  • Another bug fix in sequential Bonferroni correction for pairwise MANOVA, NPMANOVA, ANOSIM

New in PAST 2.08 (Mar 31, 2011)

  • Plot quality improved (antialiasing, floating point coordinates, cardinal splines, alpha blending, etc.)
  • Generalized Linear Model, including logistic (logit) regression.
  • Partial linear correlation with any number of controlling variables
  • Combination of errors (weighted mean, plot of summed probability density)
  • Brillouin diversity index
  • CCA: option to amplify triplot vectors
  • Ternary plot: Show fourth variable with bubble plot or gridding
  • New file formats for saving graphic: TIF, GIF, PNG (in addition to JPG, BMP, EMF).
  • Wavelets: Plotting of Cone of Influence.
  • Linear 1 independent, n dependent regression: Outputs overall MSE and R2. Table of all coefficients.
  • 2D kernel density: Choice between four different kernel functions
  • Kolmogorov-Smirnov test: Added permutation test.
  • NPMANOVA: Option for sequential Bonferroni correction in pairwise post-hoc
  • Past file format: Now accepts space character inside cells (double-quoted in file)
  • Minor bug fixes.

New in PAST 2.07 (Feb 9, 2011)

  • Partial Mantel test
  • Cross validation for CVA classifier
  • 95% confidence band for LOESS smoothing
  • Stereoplots now include density maps (colour or grey scale)
  • Read molecular sequence files in the Arlequin format
  • Bitmaps made smoother in gridding and kernel density modules
  • Procrustes fitting: Option to rescale to original centroid sizes
  • MANOVA post-hoc pairwise comparisons: Now reports sequential Bonferroni corrections and Mahalanobis distances. Now based on within-groups covar matrix pooled over all groups, not only the two compared.
  • Fitting to growth functions (logistic etc.): Now includes Akaike Information Criterion. New model Gompertz curve. Bootstrapping made more robust.
  • Gridding: New gridding method, multiquadric. Cross-validation now reports mean squared error. Kriging made faster.
  • Frame around plots.
  • Bug fix: Parsimony analysis failed for missing values (bug introduced in 2.06)
  • Bug fix: Cluster analysis failed with correlation similarity (bug introduced in 2.06)
  • Bug fix: Mahalanobis distance was reported incorrectly in the Two-group Permutation Test module (the p value from the test was correct)
  • Bug fix: Shapiro-Wilks normality test gave incorrect results when running several samples with unequal sample sizes (bug introduced in 1.96)
  • Bug fix: PCA landmark deformation: Vector plot did not honour eigenvalue scaling option
  • Bug fix: Semivariance model "cubic" was not supported by kriging (introduced in 2.06).

New in PAST 2.06 (Jan 21, 2011)

  • Short-time Fourier transform
  • Bar chart with error bars
  • New distance measure, Mahalanobis, in clustering, PCoA, NMDS, ANOSIM etc.
  • CVA now reports classifications and confusion matrix
  • Gridding (spatial interpolation) now includes cross-validation
  • Semivariogram modeling: Reports residual sum of squares. Automatic model and parameter optimization. New model: Cubic
  • Contingency table now includes permutation test
  • Fitting to Michaelis-Menten equation
  • Expansion map for thin-plate spline deformations: Option for grayscale
  • Gridding and 2D kernel density: Option for cropping to convex hull
  • Kruskal-Wallis post-hoc analysis by Mann-Whitney now uses the same version of the test as the Mann-Whitney module

New in PAST 2.05 (Dec 20, 2010)

  • Detection of alignments in point patterns
  • Quadrat richness: Chao2 updated to latest bias-corrected form. Jackknife1 variance. Bootstrapping.
  • Sinusoidal fitting: List of residuals. Occasional phase shift in plot when changing plot type, fixed.
  • PCA shape (landmark) and EFA deformation now have option for eigenvalue scaling
  • Expansion plots for grid deformation: Visual quality improved, occasional "leakage" of color fixed.
  • View numbers in Ripley's K: bug fix in copy function
  • Ripley's K: 2x speed-up
  • Smoothing spline: Plotting of the given error bars
  • Rare crash in Parks-McClellan filter fixed
  • Automatic detrending in Spectral analysis
  • Autoassociation: P values were not updated when unticking "no repetitions" option.
  • PCA: Now reports only rows-1 axes if rows-1Correspondence analysis: Plot any axis against any

New in PAST 2.04 (Oct 24, 2010)

  • Directional: Watson's goodness-of-fit test for von Mises distribution.
  • Directional: Mardia-Watson-Wheeler test for equal distribution
  • Parks-McClellan linear-phase filters (lowpass, highpass, bandpass, bandstop).
  • Open files: Support for the FASTA (NCBI specification) molecular sequence format
  • Eigenshapes: All axes reported. Fixed rare crash for view scores as numbers.
  • Runs test: Options for "runs about the mean" and "runs up and down"
  • Modern Analoque Technique: Started crashing in some recent version. Fixed.
  • PCO: User similarity and distance indices were swapped in the radio box
  • PCA: Grid and EFA deformation now use eigenvalue scaling
  • Polynomial and sinusoidal regression: AIC now uses the AIC_chisquared definition with small-sample correction

New in PAST 2.03 (Oct 24, 2010)

  • Events-in-time analysis (tests for Poisson process and trend)
  • Geographical coordinate transformations (WGS84, UTM etc.)
  • CVA: Visualization of landmark and EFA deformations along discriminant axes
  • PCA: Plot any axis against any other
  • Mixture analysis: Max n=300 limitation removed
  • CCA: Percentages of eigenvalues reported
  • REDFIT: Monte Carlo simulation now optional
  • Correlation: Exact test of Spearman's rs for n

New in PAST 2.02 (Jul 26, 2010)

  • Linear regression: Major Axis regression included
  • Linear regression: Corrected confidence bands for OLS regression with zero intercept (introduced in 2.01)
  • Smoothing spline: Option for enforcing monotone curve
  • Fitting to logistic equation: Bootstrapped confidence bands. Enforce a=1.
  • Survival analysis: Division-by zero for some data sets, fixed.
  • Wavelet analysis: Plot of one particular scale
  • Mixed similarity measure in NPMANOVA and one-way ANOSIM: Problem with repeated pop-up windows fixed.

New in PAST 2.01 (May 29, 2010)

  • REDFIT spectral analysis with red-noise model
  • Zero intercept option in linear regression (OLS, RMA and LTS)
  • Markov chain analysis for sequences
  • Renyi diversity profiles: Now with bootstrapping. Hole removed for alpha=1.
  • New algorithm for CVA
  • Test for random (Poisson) timing of events
  • CABFAC paleoenvironmental reconstruction: Now with k-fold cross validation.
  • Multiple regression: Added R^2 for each independent variable
  • Polynomial regression: Equation displayed on the plot
  • NMDS made much faster

New in PAST 2.00 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • One-way ANOVA: Analysis of residuals (plots and tests)
  • Visualization of Elliptic Fourier linear regression
  • Elliptic Fourier Analysis now also reports sizes
  • Smoothing of Mantel scalogram
  • Copy text from bivariate linear regression window
  • Landmarks: New option for projection to tangent space
  • PCA axes automatically flipped if sum of loadings is negative

New in PAST 1.99 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Import text file (whitespace, tab and comma separated, label options)
  • Numerical inaccuracy in MANOVA/CVA, introduced in 1.83, fixed
  • Diversity profiles: Incorrect results for non-integer abundance data, fixed
  • Diversity indices: Now accepts non-integer abundance data (bootstrapping still rounds to integers)
  • PLS: New equation for "Squared covar %" when used on the covariance matrix (introduced in 1.98)

New in PAST 1.98 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Can now open NTSYS files. Trees and multiple tables not supported.
  • Risk difference, risk ratio and odds ratio, all with confidence intervals and tests
  • LOESS curve smoothing
  • Mixture analysis: Now includes exponential and Poisson distributions. Moved to Model menu
  • Spearman's rho correlation: Automatically switches to exact test for N

New in PAST 1.97 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Survival analysis: Kaplan-Meier curves; logrank, Wilcoxon and Tarone-Ware tests
  • Incorrect reading of some Past files, fixed (bug introduced in 1.94)
  • Crash in Mann-Whitney if n2>n1, fixed (bug introduced in 1.91)
  • Output of residuals for multivariate linear regression
  • Numerical output for kernel density estimation
  • Visualization of PCA of Elliptic Fourier Analysis shapes

New in PAST 1.96 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • SHE diversity analysis
  • Kernel density estimation for 2D points
  • Monte Carlo version of the Jarque-Bera normality test
  • Spline deformation grid for linear regression of landmark shapes
  • Diversity profiles: Support for multiple columns, and numerical output
  • Normality tests: Support for multiple columns.
  • Box plot: Quartiles now computed as in Percentile plot module, with user-selected method
  • Added t label for significance of correlation in Linear model
  • PCA shape deform: Now allows negative PCA scores, and expansion map
  • Landmark linking for 3D: Incorrect labeling of columns, corrected

New in PAST 1.95 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • One-way ANOVA: Option for repeated measures (within-subjects)
  • Two-way ANOVA: Option for repeated measures
  • Discriminant analysis: Visualization of shape deformations along the discriminant axis, both for landmark and outline (EFA) data
  • Linear model: Option for robust regression (Least Trimmed Squares)
  • Sample rarefaction: Fix to compute variance even if s2=0
  • Removed superfluous "Shape PCA" button in PCA
  • Box plot and histogram: Crash for some degenerate data, fixed

New in PAST 1.90 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Multiple regression
  • One-way ANCOVA
  • Measures of beta diversity
  • Minor improvements in user interface and error reporting

New in PAST 1.87 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Two-way ANOSIM
  • Fligner-Killeen test for equal coefficients of variation
  • Univariate statistics: 25 and 75 percentiles were incorrect
  • CCA now uses SVD, improving numerical stability for ill-conditioned data
  • CCA: copy and print buttons were swapped
  • "Point symbols" option in graph preferences (all symbols plot as points)

New in PAST 1.83 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • All similarity measures available in all relevant windows
  • Improved plot of constrained clustering dendrogram
  • Improved plot of two-way clustering dendrogram
  • Point+line option in Graph and XY Graph
  • Copy text from all windows in the Statistics menu
  • Significant post-hoc p values marked in pink for ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis, MANOVA, ANOSIM, NPMANOVA
  • Standard font in graphics changed from Small Fonts 7 pt to Arial 8 pt
  • "Illegal value in input data" message now reports position of offending cell
  • CVA scatter plot is now centered on zero, and "nuisance" axes higher than Ngroups-1 not reported
  • Rare crash in NMDS for duplicate points fixed
  • A number of other minor improvements in user interface

New in PAST 1.79 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Watson-Williams test for equal mean in two directional samples
  • DCA now expects samples in rows and species in columns
  • Paste function in Rename Columns
  • RASC: Speed increase, and increased maximum number of cycles to 3000
  • Bug fix: EDMA crashed for large number of landmarks
  • Bug fix: Zero plotting range (giving blank plot) in rare cases

New in PAST 1.72 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Polynomial regression
  • New in directional statistics: Angular kernel density estimation, confidence interval on angular mean, plot of mean with CI.
  • Bug fix: Incorrect p values in NPMANOVA post-hoc tests for Euclidean, Horn and Manhattan distance (introduced in ver. 1.61)
  • R2 and p values in sinusoidal fitting
  • Bug fix: Minimal spanning tree of only two points crash
  • XY plot for several pairs of columns now support unequal N
  • Chi-squared test for normal distribution removed from menu and added to Normality module
  • Output from two-way ANOVA can now be copied
  • Detrending option now ticked by default in DCA

New in PAST 1.70 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Bug fix in Elliptic Fourier Analysis: incorrect rotations for some data sets when using "Invariant to rotation" option.
  • Partial warps: affine component now included also in the numerical output

New in PAST 1.67 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Sample-based species accumulation curves ("Mao tau")
  • Open and save Excel files
  • Shape PCA can be visualized as relative warp grids
  • Two-way ANOVA now supports unbalanced designs (unequal sample sizes)
  • Box plot now includes column labels
  • Geometric mean in Univariate Statistics
  • Open files in the CONOP format
  • Filter stratigraphic events on type (FAD, LAD etc.)

New in PAST 1.62 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Faster save
  • Improved contour plots (matrix plot and gridding)
  • Colour map option in matrix plot and gridding
  • Option for thick lines in all plots
  • Rose plot: Option for circular "grid"
  • Univariate statistics: Sum of values included
  • Polar and elliptic Fourier shape analysis: Number of harmonics increased to 20
  • PCA: The SVD option is now default
  • Script language: Decimal point/comma issue resolved
  • Log (transform menu): Constant no longer automatically added for zero or negative data.

New in PAST 1.61 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Pairwise post-hoc comparisons in ANOSIM and NPMANOVA
  • Two-way cluster analysis plot improved, and size limit removed
  • Rare crash in sinusoidal fit fixed
  • New definition of Akaike information criterion in sinusoidal fit
  • Correspondence analysis: All eigenvalues reported, not just four
  • Rayleigh test for directional data: Limit of N=200 removed
  • "p=0" changed to "p

New in PAST 1.60 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Time series analysis: Maximum-likelihood ARMA modelling, and Box-Jenkins intervention analysis.

New in PAST 1.58 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Sinusoidal fitting can now also optimize frequencies
  • Chi-squared and Akaike statistics in sinusoidal fitting
  • Counter window for microfossil counting
  • Linear fitting: Fix of bug in bootstrapping, introduced in v. 1.57
  • Area used for Ripley's K can now be set manually
  • New options for input format in Appearance Event Ordination

New in PAST 1.57 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Ripley's K statistics for point patterns
  • Bubble plot for 3D data
  • Linear fit: Permutation test on R2
  • Permutation test for Spearman/Kendall non-parametric correlation
  • Correlation matrix: Spearman/Kendall option added
  • Sort on color
  • CA, DCA and PCO: Scatter plot on axes 1+3
  • All scatter plots have mouse-over labels
  • Mixture analysis: Akaike information criterion added (for selecting number of groups)
  • New algorithm for setting tick marks in plots

New in PAST 1.54 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • New similarity measures: Kulczynski and Ochiai
  • Confidence ellipses drawn with Bezier curves (graphical quality improvement)
  • "Invisible rectangles" in copied graphics removed
  • Files can be opened by dragging from desktop
  • Cladistics: Bug fix in character reconstruction with Wagner optimisation (tree topology was OK)
  • Option for showing branch lengths on parsimony trees
  • Correspondence analysis: All-zero rows and columns placed on the origin in the plot (previously an error message was given)
  • Some similarity measures (Dice, Jaccard etc.) were undefined for all-zeros data. This caused problems when bootstrapping sparse data sets in clustering and neighbour joining. Similarity is now set to zero in such cases.

New in PAST 1.50 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Neighbour joining clustering
  • Minor bug fixes

New in PAST 1.48 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Almost 30 new functions available in the scripting language
  • Bug fixed: Confidence ellipses and convex hulls incorrectly drawn for datasets with same color used in several groups
  • NMDS scatter plot automatically rotated to major axis

New in PAST 1.43 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Post-hoc analysis for MANOVA, by simple Bonferroni-corrected pairwise Hotelling's T2
  • Mantel correlogram and Mantel periodogram for multivariate time series
  • Function for regular spacing of irregular time series by interpolation
  • Bug fixed: Kolmogorov-Smirnov always reported p=1 for very large sample sizes
  • Bug fixed: Mann-Whitney crashed for very large sample sizes

New in PAST 1.40 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Bootstrapping in cluster analysis
  • Improved user interface for the "Evaluate expression" function

New in PAST 1.38 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • All eigenvalues reported in PCO (not just first four)
  • Bug fix in DCA: Crash for zero eigenvalues
  • Added "Slope" and "intercept" captions to linear regression
  • Bug fix: "Oval" and "Star" row symbols not properly loaded from datafile
  • Bug fix in PCO: Numerical output crashed for zero eigenvalues
  • Default XY plot mode changed from lines to points
  • Point distribuion statistics: Small correction in expected distance calculation. Added option for edge effect adjustments, and option for rectangle rather than convex hull for area.

New in PAST 1.35 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Two-way ANOVA
  • Mardia's multivariate normality tests (multivariate skewness & kurtosis)
  • Option to change tick mark density in all plots
  • Cross-evaluation (leave-one-out) in discriminant analysis
  • Choice of allometric or isometric size removal in Burnaby module
  • Box's M: Better error reporting

New in PAST 1.30 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • "Capture-recapture" species richness estimators: Chao2, first- and second-order jackknife, bootstrap.
  • Size removal of multivariate morphometric data by Burnaby's method
  • Bootstrapped confidence intervals in logistic fit
  • Option to standardize rotation and starting point in Elliptic Fourier Analysis
  • Increase from 9 to 12 different symbols/colors

New in PAST 1.25 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Added offset value to discriminant function output
  • PCO: Added plotting of axes 2+3
  • NMDS: Factor 10 speed-up
  • Unitary Associations: Factor 10 speed-up for some data sets

New in PAST 1.22 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Minimal spanning trees for PCO and NMDS
  • Data set size limit removed for PCA and PCO (but less than 500 columns for PCA and 500 rows for PCO still recommended because of computation time).
  • Faster Open of very large data files
  • Faster Transpose of very large data sets
  • "Insert more columns" occasional freeze: Bug fixed
  • Diversity indices - bad behaviour for all-zero columns: Bug fixed
  • Occasional missing lines in multipage dendrograms: Bug fixed
  • Occasional incorrect results in polar Fourier shape analysis (not Elliptic Fourier): Bug fixed

New in PAST 1.21 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Raw similarity/distance matrix for all measures
  • Cosine similarity measure
  • Maximum number of columns for PCA (and rows for PCO) increased from 200 to 512
  • Maximum number of characters for cladistics increased from 128 to 200
  • Maximum number of taxa for cladistics increased from 255 to 511
  • Improved reading of trees from NEXUS files
  • Crash when transposing matrices with more columns than rows, bug fixed

New in PAST 1.20 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Fixed two bugs in cladistics: Wrong tree length sometimes given when changing tree in cladogram display, and wrong character states sometimes given for terminal taxa when the root state is a question mark.
  • Hotelling's T2 made more robust using Moore-Penrose generalized matrix inverse.
  • Linear regression residuals includes rows with question marks
  • Experimental feature: Stratigraphically constrained cluster analysis

New in PAST 1.17 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • CONOP: Occasional long pause at startup, bug fixed
  • CONOP: Option for using event numbers instead of names in range chart
  • RASC: PAST can now read files in the RASC .DAT-format
  • RASC: Reports the number of cycles
  • RASC: Dendrogram truncation at bottom and top, bug fixed
  • RASC: Loss of taxa when rerunning RASC without closing window, bug fixed.

New in PAST 1.12 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • NPMANOVA (Non-Parametric MANOVA) with 12 distance measures
  • 'Edit labels' mode in the data entry spreadsheet
  • Copy data from the F/t and chi^2 test windows
  • Bug fixed: Occasional crash in PCO scatter plot
  • Bug fixed: CVA loadings window not staying in front

New in PAST 1.10 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Black-and-white option for all graphics
  • Y axis can be scaled in cluster analysis

New in PAST 1.03 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • 95% confidence interval for autocorrelation
  • Black square when copying graphic, bug fixed
  • Seriation copy data, bug fixed
  • Grid lost when resizing multivariate allometry graphic, bug fixed
  • XY graph: added support for row colors and labels

New in PAST 1.00 (Apr 1, 2010)

  • Improved Shapiro-Wilk test (max N increased from 50 to 5000)
  • Improved Rayleigh test for directional data (max N increased from 50 to 200)
  • Hamming distance for categorical data added to cluster analysis, PCO and NMDS
  • Permutation test added to "compare diversities" module
  • Permutation test added to chi-squared module