CHANGES IN OPTMATCH VERSION 0.6 NEW FEATURES * There is a new generic function, mdist(), for creating matching distances. It accepts: fitted glm's, which it uses to extract propensity distances; formulas, which it uses to construct squared Mahalanobis distances; and functions, with which a user can construct his or her own type of distance. The function method is more intuitive to work with than the older makedist() function. * A new function, caliper(), builds on the mdist() structure to provide a convenient way to add calipers to a distance. In contrast to earlier ways of adding calipers, caliper() has an optional argument specify observations to be excluded from the caliper requirement --- this permits one to relax it for just a few observations, for instance. * summary.optmatch() now removes strata in which matching failed (b/c the matching problem was found to be infeasible) before summarizing. It also indicates when such strata are present, and how many observations fall in them. * Demo has been updated to reflect changes as of version 0.4, 0.5, 0.6. DEPRECATED & DEFUNCT * The vignette is sufficiently out of date that it's been removed. BUG FIXES * subsetting of objects of class optmatch now preserves matched.distances attribute. * fixed bug in maxControlsCap/minControlsCap whereby they behaved unreliably on subclasses within which some subjects had no permissible matches. * Removed unnecessary panic in fullmatch when it was given a min.controls argument with attributes other than names (as when it is created by tapply()). * fixed bug wherein summary.optmatch fails to retrieve balance tests if given a propensity model that had function calls in its formula. * Documentation pages for fullmatch, pairmatch filled out a bit. Changes in optmatch version 0.5 New features: * summary.optmatch() completely revised. It now reports information about the configuration of the matched sets and about matched distances. In addition, if given a fitted propensity model as a second argument it summarizes covariate balance.