SCMs 0.1.1

Resubmission of 0.1.0, which CRAN returned for changes in February 2026.

Bug fixes

• Covariates observed in only some pre-treatment years are aggregated over the observed years. Previously mean() received the missing values, the feature became NA, and it was dropped without a message, so a specification meant to match on many covariates could keep only one.
• Placebo inference keeps control units whose names contain spaces, hyphens or periods. Previously these units were silently left out of the placebo distribution.
• Two-sided placebo p-values (expected_direction = "two_sided") rank units by absolute effect. Previously the unit with the largest effect received p = 0.
• Outcome models no longer share one mutable synthetic-control fit (the augmented SCM model altered the fit used by the others), and ridge/lasso cross-validation folds are deterministic.
• run_spec_curve_analysis() passes cores to spec_curve(), which previously ran single-threaded unless params contained its own cores entry.
• Parallel workers run the same SCMs code as the calling session (fork clusters on Unix); on Windows, a mismatch with the installed package is an error.

Silent failures are now errors

• A failed placebo run stops with the unit’s name instead of being skipped.
• scdata() names donors that have no pre-treatment data instead of failing with an unrelated error.
• Ridge penalty estimation stops instead of falling back to default values.
• plot_spec_curve() stops when SHAP values do not cover the specification grid.

Changes

• expected_direction defaults to "two_sided" in inference_sc(), inference_placebo(), spec_curve() and run_spec_curve_analysis().
• New curve-level statistic curve_stat = "median_tau" (signed median). One-sided curve-level tests (two_sided = FALSE) require it, because the other statistics are non-negative.
• scest() exposes the inner interior-point solver tolerances (margin.ipop, sigf.ipop, bound.ipop).
• SHAP attribution encodes every level of each categorical specification choice.
• plot_spec_curve() always draws Panel B labels as rich text (richtext_feature_labels is removed) and no longer prints SHAP merge diagnostics.
• Requires ‘CVXR’ 1.9.0 or later, which replaced solve() with psolve(). ‘ECOSolveR’ is now imported directly, because ‘CVXR’ no longer provides the default ECOS solver.

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