Release Notes¶

0.8.0¶

See the GitHub milestone for full change list.

Dropped support for Python 3.5
Removed *args from Algorithm.fit, so additional data must be provided via keyword arguments
Made Algorithm.fit implementations consistently take **kwargs for hybrid flexibility

Substantial performance and stability improvements to item-item
Added a coordinate descent solver to explicit-feedback ALS and made it the default. The old LU-based solver is still available with method='lu'.
Added a conjugate gradient solver to implicit-feedback ALS and made it the default.
Added a random recommender

See the GitHub milestone for full change list.

Use Joblib for parallelism in batch routines.
nprocs arguments are renamed to n_jobs for consistency with Joblib.
Removed parallel option on MultiEval algorithms, as it was unused.
Made MultiEval default to using each recommender’s default candidate set, and adapt algorithms to recommenders prior to evaluation.
Make MultiEval require named arguments for most things.
Add support to MultiEval to save the fit models.
RecListAnalysis can optionally ensure all test users are returned, even if they lack recommendation lists.
Performance improvements to algorithms and evaluation.

See the GitHub milestone for full change list.

Fix inconsistency in both code and docs for recommend list sizes for top-N evaluation.
Fix user-user to correctly use sum aggregate.
Improve performance and documentation

See the GitHub milestone for a summary of what’s happening!

The save and load methods on algorithms have been removed. Just pickle fitted models to save their data. This is what SciKit does, we see no need to deviate.
The APIs and model structures for top-N recommendation is reworked to enable algorithms to produce recommendations more automatically. The Recommender interfaces now take a CandidateSelector to determine default candidates, so client code does not need to compute candidates on their own. One effect of this is that the batch.recommend function no longer requires a candidate selector, and there can be problems if you call Recommender.adapt before fitting a model.
Top-N evaluation has been completely revamped to make it easier to correctly implement and run evaluation metrics. Batch recommend no longer attaches ratings to recommendations. See Top-N evaluation for details.
Batch recommend & predict functions now take nprocs as a keyword-only argument.
Several bug fixes and testing improvements.

These changes should not affect you if you are only consuming LensKit’s algorithm and evaluation capabilities.

Rewrite the CSR class to be more ergonomic from Python, at the expense of making the NumPy jitclass indirect. It is available in the .N attribute. Big improvement: it is now picklable.

LensKit 0.5.0 modifies the algorithm APIs to follow the SciKit design patterns instead of our previous custom patterns. Highlights of this change:

Algorithms are trained in-place — we no longer have distinct model objects.
Model data is stored as attributes on the algorithm object that end in _.
Instead of writing model = algo.train_model(ratings), call algo.fit(ratings).

We also have some new capabilities:

A number of improvements, including replacing Cython/OpenMP with Numba and adding ALS.

A lot of fixes to get ready for RecSys.

Hello, world!