LensKit 0.13.0 now available - please upgrade!

[Michael Ekstrand]

LensKit 0.13.0 is now available. I encourage everyone to upgrade!

Full details on this release are in the release notes. This release includes fixes for two important bugs (a resource leak in parallel evaluation and a correctness bug affecting our biased matrix factorizers - thanks to David Cortes for spotting it). I have also put some notes about deprecations.

We also now follow NEP 29's recommendations for Python and NumPy version support, so 0.13 no longer supports Python 3.6 or NumPy 1.16.

Another highlight of 0.13.0 is that it now attempts to detect common multithreading configuration problems and logs warning messages (prior to model training) if it spots such a problem. Bug reports or pull requests adding additional checks to this logic are most welcome!

I expect to make at least one more 0.x release (0.14). I think there is a good chance that after releasing 0.14.0, it will make sense for the next major release to move us out of in-development territory and bump to LensKit 4.0, but we may release an 0.15 depending on how the APIs feel as we use them in more experiments. One significant upcoming change that will be in 0.14, besides enforcing some deprecations that are currently warnings, is to move bridge code out into separate repositories (and PyPI projects), to make LensKit development more modular and to decrease the testing overhead of maintaining the LensKit source code.

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Michael D. Ekstrand — michael...@boisestate.edu — https://md.ekstrandom.net
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, Boise State University

People and Information Research Team (PIReT) — http://coen.boisestate.edu/piret/

I may send mail outside of working hours; I do not expect you to. He/him.