Other Smaller Improvements

In addition to its major new features, Netica has the following improvements:

From version 4.16 to version 5.12

  When printing a net, you can enter the number of pages you want it to appear on, instead of just the magnification.  Default is 1.  But if you want to enter a magnification instead, just put blank entries for the number of pages.

  Keeps track of starting experience used for learning (normally 1 for each state).  Saves in NETA file for each node, and adjusts when doing table hardening or softening.

  Fixed: When select multiple nodes and do Sensitivity to Findings, gave a #2516 error.

  Fixed: Sometimes constant nodes weren't registered to be available to equations until after saving to file and re-reading.

  While EM learning from a case file having a case inconsistent with the Bayes net, now puts the IDnum of the case in the error message, and allows halting or continuing without it.

  Equations now recognize discrete constant nodes with a state setting.

  Names of built-in node-sets are now preceded by colon (:) instead of dash (-)

  Fixed: Process Cases didn't work when there was a finding entered in the net (gave a 2592 C0000005 error).

   Mouse wheel now zooms in/out when pressing ctrl key, and scrolls horizontally when pressing shift key, scrolls vertically when not pressing any key.

•   Improved Combine Nets, so it now adds CPTs (as if learned from the combined set of case files).  It will automatically re-arrange tables if state orders are different.

•   Added to Custom-Report functionality: Node tags for "ExpectedUtility", "ExpectedUtilityList", "BestChoice", and Net tags for "UtilitiesTable" (like BeliefsTable, but gives utilities).  When asked for beliefs of decision nodes, it used to give utilities, but it no longer does that.

•   In Custom-Reports: Added "ExpectedValue", "Variance" and "StandardDeviation" tags.  Changed name of tag "VarianceReal" to "VarianceReduction" and "BeliefVariance" to "BeliefVarianceReduction".

•   Added Custom-Report tags  "StateLabel"  and  "Belief" to do a single state at a time.

•   Custom-Reports can now loop over the nodes of a nodeset or net, using the 'foreach' tag.

•   Improved Custom-Reports feature, changed the way some arguments work, including "Absent", "Empty" (replaces "ShowMissing").

•   In Custom-Reports: When making a report list (e.g. BeliefsList), if no separator was specified, it use to concatenate, but now it separates with "  ".  If you want it to concatenate, you can put  Separator=""

•   When open a .cas file (not as-text) it opens a text editing window with tabs set properly for the column widths (i.e., "spreadsheet mode").

•   It is better at opening different text file types (.tsv, .tab, .uvf, etc) in the text editor, and deciding when to edit as tabbed-delimited "spreadsheet mode".

•   Speeded up EM learning from data and also gradient ascent learning.

•   Improved reading values from case files (especially Excel files):  ability to interpret unusual situations, its error reporting and ability to halt.  For example, it now handles ">70" if there is a discrete node with the state title ">70" (before it always tried to interpret it as a UVF value).

•   When reading in a case file from a spreadsheet or database (ODBC), and there are nodes without columns, now it doesn't ask you for every node to enter the corresponding column, but just alerts you and asks if you want to continue.

•   Allows adding states or increasing range when reading in a case from file, asked for by a dialog box when out-of-range values or new states are encountered.

•   Change in reading case files.  Now treats tabs as always separators, instead of sometimes as just whitespace (so 2 in a row will give an empty entry).

•   Fixed: Case files with old MacOS line ends (i.e., \r) didn't work (gave message that file had no cases).

•   Cases Learn Add Case File Nodes command can handle database (but not text) UVF format case files (including adding all the states mentioned in likelihood findings).

•   Can now search bayes nets and text files for general unicode strings.

•   Added Select Nodes With Tables to main menu and right-click menu, to select those nodes having CPT or function tables.

•   Now makes sensitivity reports terse by default; to get verbose, hold down the shift key.

•   Speedup of some built-in equation functions.

•   CPT editor: For a deterministic discretized node, can now paste the real continuous values into the table, and they are converted to the states displayed (uses decimal point to recognize continuous values, # sign to recognize indexes, and asks if there are neither).

•   Right-click a continuous node with deterministic function table, and can now Auto-Discretize based on the values in the function table (and by entering a high number of states, can convert it to a discrete node).

•   Can now re-connect links (or switch parents) to a parent node a with different number states, if the child node has no tables.

•   Generating a random case (by Cases Random Case, or by new F6 shortcut key) now respects findings already entered, generates the random case based on them and enters it into findings only for selected nodes (all nodes if none are selected), and generates new beliefs for the remaining nodes (provided auto-update is on).  Next press of F6 removes findings for all nodes except those that had findings initially, then repeats process.  Remove-findings command removes only new findings found by Netica and leaves initial findings (do it twice to remove all findings).

•   Added Right-Click  Modify Order States By Other Node to sort the states of a node, so they match the order of another node.

•   For DBNs and time series: Can set persist value for a node using the node properties dialog.  Nodes that persist longer than the total time now extend into time<0

•   When hot-linking output to Excel, for nodes (discrete or continuous) that provide a real number, it now also pastes into Excel links for the expected value and standard deviation.

•   Fixed: Entry of IDName in some places (such as the name of a user field) was being restricted to 15 characters instead of 30.

•   Now leaves selected nodes hilited while doing a right-click operation.

•   Fixed: When compiled a net with a constant node as a parent (sometimes it mattered whether it had a finding), it could generate an internal error.

•   Prevents compiling a net having a constant node with a link into or out of it by error -3647.  This is to make way for version 6, where those links will no longer be ignored.

•   Fixed: When did Sensitivity to Findings with more than 2 nodes selected and the target node is numeric, it gave a 2516 error (bug since version 4.12).

•   Fixed: When in Limited mode, was giving a "more than 15 nodes" warning, even if some of those nodes were just for documentation.

From version 3.25 to version 4.16

  Greatly improved the CPTable editor, both cosmetically and functionally.

  Text editor: Handles larger text files (up to 2GB) for text editing, instead of just 30K.  Helps avoid Messages Window overflow.  Text entry in dialog boxes (such as user fields) can also take larger text amounts.

  Disconnecting/connecting links now works better.  The tool button can reconnect as well as disconnect.  When right-click on a disconnected link, menu now has "Reconnect", which reconnects link to original node (even across file save/read).

  Can now read .xlsx and .accdb database case files (as well as the old .xls and .mdb).

  When reading a case file, missing data symbols (empty, ' ', ?, *, N/A) will now instead be interpreted as a state, if the node has a state with an exactly matching state title.

  New onscreen help system.

  Within .dne files, it now uses a superior flat format for tables (which means the Bayes net files it creates cannot be completely read by very old versions of Netica (previous to 2.27 of 2003-05-02)).  But, of course, new versions of Netica can still read all the old .dne files, created by any previous version of Netica.

  Fixed: When reading UVF files, uncertain findings for states with an _ in their name caused error #2878.

  Fixed: When reading UVF files, extra spaces could cause errors.

  Fixed: When left and right mouse buttons in Windows were configured as left-handed, Netica couldn't select nodes.

  Fixed: Reading Hugin files didn't work as well as earlier versions of Netica.

  Can now read XML BIF 0.3 files, as described in 1998 Fabio Cozman document:  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/fgcozman/www/Research/InterchangeFormat/

  Mouse wheel now scrolls instead of zooms.

  Node dialog: Fixed up the node properties dialog box multipurpose box display and entry of state info (state names, state titles, state comments, state numbers) significantly (eg, allow single entry or "All" at once for each).

From version 3.18 to version 3.25:

Fixed bug: Sometimes after adding a utility node (or any undiscretized continuous node), and then trying to access its table, an internal error would result.

Improved Unicode support (LabelBox display, docn nodes, setting by right-clicking, etc.)

Fixed "Process Cases" to work with UVF files.

Undo/redo for nodeset operations now works properly.

Obfuscate net deletes documentation nodes.

Improved the support for old versions of Microsoft Windows (Windows 95, 98, Me).

From version 3.16 to version 3.18:

Table editor now has a * indicator in its title bar to show when changes have been made that are not yet applied to the node.

Comments that you create to appear when the mouse hovers over a node or state can now be multi-line.

Links are now always drawn underneath the nodes for diagram clarity.

Fixed annoying situation where equation is constantly re-established when trying to delete equation from node properties dialog by backspacing.

Fixed problems occurring when no default printer is installed, such as error message: **1223** X component of `drawing bounds` in VISUAL net 'V1' is too large (= ..., but maximum is 16383).

Fixed bug: Database access gave an error when the first node in the net was skipped (i.e., wasn't a database column).

Lots of small improvements to the table editor dialog box.

Fixed bug: 'Add Case File Nodes' didn't do anything in some situations.

Can now scroll with arrow keys.

Can now enter empty strings for values of user-defined fields in node dialog box.

If nodes at each end of a link are in "hidden" format, the link is not drawn.

Other minor improvements and bug fixes.