NEWS

maraca 1.1.0 (2025-11-20)

Adaption to changes in hce package. The standardized output object is now of class adhce. This means also that there is a more standardized output that make it easier to work with. As a result, the maraca package has now a higher hce version dependency (0.8.5). Also, all class dependent functions in the package have been updated to only work on the adhce class object (for example plot.adhce()).

New parameter remove_outliers in plot.maraca() and plot.adhce(). In some cases, there might be outliers that skew the displayed range for the continuous endpoint. There is now an option to display the continuous endpoint without the outliers by setting the parameter remove_outliers = TRUE in the plot.maraca() or plot.adhce() function. We define outliers here according to the common boxplot calculation definition: any data outside the range 25th percentile - 1.5 * IQR (inter-quartile range) and 75th percentile + 1.5 * IQR. Note that this required some refactoring in how the plot is constructed. Especially the violin plot is now pre-calculated and then plotted using the ggplot2 function geom_polygon() (rather than the geom_violin() function).
If parameter density_plot_type = "box" is selected, the boxplot will now contain vertical segments to indicate where the whiskers end.

There is a new experimental feature included - the animate_maraca() function. This is an animated version of the standard maraca plot to allow to show how the plot is being built up step-by-step. Note that the gganimate package needs to be installed to create the animation. Additionally, to save the animation as a gif, the package gifski needs to be installed. This is an experimental feature, so despite doing some testing during development there might be some problems or unexpected behavior during usage. Please take a minute to report any wrong behavior to allow us to improve the functionality.

Slight change in automatic checks after an update of the hce package (dependency).

Introducing the mosaic_plot - a new plot to compares outcome between an active treatment group and a control group, highlighting areas of "Wins", "Losses" and "Ties" based on endpoint hierarchy. Details are given in the new vignette "Maraca Plots - Introduction to the Mosaic plot".
Updated help files
Added 2 additional aliases for cumulative_plot() function - dustin() and dustin_plot().

Fix reported bug "plot.hce gives an error if only one time-to-event outcome is provided.". Now plotting functionaloty works even when only 1 step outcome is part of the hierarchical endpoint.

Updated author information.

The maraca package has been re-factored to allow flexibility in the type of outcomes that can be visualized. The user can now also include binary endpoints in their hierarchical endpoint. Details are given in the new vignette "Maraca Plots - Alternative Endpoints".
Additionally to the component_plot(), there has been a new plot added called cumulative_plot(). As opposed to the previous plot showing the individual components of the win odds computation, this plot is displaying the endpoints cumulated instead (adding one component of hierarchical endpoint at a time). Details can be found in the vignette "Maraca Plots - Plotting win odds".

As part of the re-factoring to allow for other endpoint types, the parameter tte_outcomes has been changed to step_outcomes and the parameter continuous_outcome to last_outcome.

The trans parameter in the plotting functions was not working as intended. It now enables x-axis transformation for the continuous endpoint part of the plot.

The theme argument in the plotting functions allows users to easily change the styling of the plot. Details are given in the new vignette "Maraca Plots - Themes and Styling".
A new plot to visualize the win odds components was added. The component_plot() function works for both maraca and hce. Details can be found in the new vignette "Maraca Plots - Plotting win odds".
A new vignette called "Maraca Plots - Validation" to highlight the function validate_maraca() that was added in version 0.5.

maraca now has increased the version dependency for the package hce to >= 0.5.
The hce package is now automatically attached when loading maraca.

Small bug fix to account for changes in HCE objects created in newest version of HCE package

print() function for maraca objects that summarizes key information.
New validate_maraca() function that extracts key information from a maraca plot object. This can be used to validate the plot against independently coded versions (for example using a different programming language).
The maraca() function now requires an input for the parameter fixed_followup_days. Note that there can be no observed events in the data after the follow-up time specified.

Problem with jumps in the cumulative distribution functions fixed. As part of this fix, the package does not depend on the survival package anymore.

The plot_tte_components() function for plotting the individual time-to-event outcomes was removed from the package since it did not prove to be overly useful.
The plot_tte_composite() was removed for now since the package cannot correctly calculate the composite version of looking at multiple time-to-event endpoints when patients have multiple events.