[SciPy-Dev] ANN: SciPy 0.12.0 beta 1 release

Sat Feb 16 16:34:44 EST 2013

Hi,

I am pleased to announce the availability of the first beta release of SciPy
0.12.0. This is shaping up to be another solid release, with some cool new
features (see highlights below) and a large amount of bug fixes and
maintenance work under the hood. The number of contributors also keeps
rising steadily, we're at 74 so far for this release.

Sources and binaries can be found at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/scipy/files/scipy/0.12.0b1/, release notes
are copied below. A Python 3.3 Windows installer will follow soon.

Please try this release and report any problems on the mailing list.

Cheers,
Ralf

==========================
SciPy 0.12.0 Release Notes
==========================

.. note:: Scipy 0.12.0 is not released yet!

SciPy 0.12.0 is the culmination of 7 months of hard work. It contains
many new features, numerous bug-fixes, improved test coverage and
better documentation.  There have been a number of deprecations and
API changes in this release, which are documented below.  All users
are encouraged to upgrade to this release, as there are a large number
of bug-fixes and optimizations.  Moreover, our development attention
will now shift to bug-fix releases on the 0.12.x branch, and on adding
new features on the master branch.

Some of the highlights of this release are:

  - Completed QHull wrappers in scipy.spatial.
  - cKDTree now a drop-in replacement for KDTree.
  - A new global optimizer, basinhopping.
  - Support for Python 2 and Python 3 from the same code base (no more
2to3).

This release requires Python 2.6, 2.7 or 3.1-3.3 and NumPy 1.5.1 or greater.
Support for Python 2.4 and 2.5 has been dropped as of this release.

New features
============

``scipy.spatial`` improvements
------------------------------

cKDTree feature-complete
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Cython version of KDTree, cKDTree, is now feature-complete.  Most operations
(construction, query, query_ball_point, query_pairs, count_neighbors and
sparse_distance_matrix) are between 200 and 1000 times faster in cKDTree
than
in KDTree.  With very minor caveats, cKDTree has exactly the same interface
as
KDTree, and can be used as a drop-in replacement.

Voronoi diagrams and convex hulls
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
`scipy.spatial` now contains functionality for computing Voronoi
diagrams and convex hulls using the Qhull library. (Delaunay
triangulation was available since Scipy 0.9.0.)

Delaunay improvements
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
It's now possible to pass in custom Qhull options in Delaunay
triangulation. Coplanar points are now also recorded, if present.
Incremental construction of Delaunay triangulations is now also
possible.

Spectral estimators (``scipy.signal``)
--------------------------------------
The functions ``scipy.signal.periodogram`` and ``scipy.signal.welch`` were
added, providing DFT-based spectral estimators.

``scipy.optimize`` improvements
-------------------------------

Callback functions in L-BFGS-B and TNC
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
A callback mechanism was added to L-BFGS-B and TNC minimization solvers.

Basin hopping global optimization (``scipy.optimize.basinhopping``)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
A new global optimization algorithm.  Basinhopping is designed to
efficiently
find the global minimum of a smooth function.

``scipy.special`` improvements
------------------------------

Revised complex error functions
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The computation of special functions related to the error function now uses
a
new `Faddeeva library from MIT <http://ab-initio.mit.edu/Faddeeva>`__ which
increases their numerical precision. The scaled and imaginary error
functions
``erfcx`` and ``erfi`` were also added, and the Dawson integral ``dawsn``
can
now be evaluated for a complex argument.

Faster orthogonal polynomials
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Evaluation of orthogonal polynomials (the ``eval_*`` routines) in now
faster in ``scipy.special``, and their ``out=`` argument functions
properly.

``scipy.sparse.linalg`` features
--------------------------------
- In ``scipy.sparse.linalg.spsolve``, the ``b`` argument can now be either
  a vector or a matrix.
- ``scipy.sparse.linalg.inv`` was added.  This uses ``spsolve`` to compute
  a sparse matrix inverse.
- ``scipy.sparse.linalg.expm`` was added.  This computes the exponential of
  a sparse matrix using a similar algorithm to the existing dense array
  implementation in ``scipy.linalg.expm``.

Listing Matlab(R) file contents in ``scipy.io``
-----------------------------------------------
A new function ``whosmat`` is available in ``scipy.io`` for inspecting
contents
of MAT files without reading them to memory.

Documented BLAS and LAPACK low-level interfaces (``scipy.linalg``)
------------------------------------------------------------------
The modules `scipy.linalg.blas` and `scipy.linalg.lapack` can be used
to access low-level BLAS and LAPACK functions.

Polynomial interpolation improvements (``scipy.interpolate``)
-------------------------------------------------------------
The barycentric, Krogh, piecewise and pchip polynomial interpolators in
``scipy.interpolate`` accept now an ``axis`` argument.

Deprecated features
===================

`scipy.lib.lapack`
------------------
The module `scipy.lib.lapack` is deprecated. You can use
`scipy.linalg.lapack`
instead. The module `scipy.lib.blas` was deprecated earlier in Scipy 0.10.0.

`fblas` and `cblas`
-------------------
Accessing the modules `scipy.linalg.fblas`, `cblas`, `flapack`, `clapack` is
deprecated. Instead, use the modules `scipy.linalg.lapack` and
`scipy.linalg.blas`.

Backwards incompatible changes
==============================

Removal of ``scipy.io.save_as_module``
--------------------------------------
The function ``scipy.io.save_as_module`` was deprecated in Scipy 0.11.0,
and is
now removed.

Its private support modules ``scipy.io.dumbdbm_patched`` and
``scipy.io.dumb_shelve`` are also removed.

Other changes
=============

Authors
=======
* Anton Akhmerov +
* Alexander Eberspächer +
* Anne Archibald
* Jisk Attema +
* K.-Michael Aye +
* bemasc +
* Sebastian Berg +
* François Boulogne +
* Matthew Brett
* Lars Buitinck
* Steven Byrnes +
* Tim Cera +
* Christian +
* Keith Clawson +
* David Cournapeau
* Nathan Crock +
* endolith
* Bradley M. Froehle +
* Matty G
* Christoph Gohlke
* Ralf Gommers
* Robert David Grant +
* Yaroslav Halchenko
* Charles Harris
* Jonathan Helmus
* Andreas Hilboll
* Hugo +
* Oleksandr Huziy
* Jeroen Demeyer +
* Johannes Schönberger +
* Steven G. Johnson +
* Chris Jordan-Squire
* Jonathan Taylor +
* Niklas Kroeger +
* Jerome Kieffer +
* kingson +
* Josh Lawrence
* Denis Laxalde
* Alex Leach +
* Lorenzo Luengo +
* Stephen McQuay +
* MinRK
* Sturla Molden +
* Eric Moore +
* mszep +
* Matt Newville +
* Vlad Niculae
* Travis Oliphant
* David Parker +
* Fabian Pedregosa
* Josef Perktold
* Zach Ploskey +
* Alex Reinhart +
* richli +
* Gilles Rochefort +
* Ciro Duran Santillli +
* Jan Schlueter +
* Jonathan Scholz +
* Anthony Scopatz
* Skipper Seabold
* Fabrice Silva +
* Scott Sinclair
* Jacob Stevenson +
* Sturla Molden +
* Julian Taylor +
* thorstenkranz +
* John Travers +
* trueprice +
* Nicky van Foreest
* Jacob Vanderplas
* Patrick Varilly
* Daniel Velkov +
* Pauli Virtanen
* Stefan van der Walt
* Warren Weckesser

A total of 74 people contributed to this release.
People with a "+" by their names contributed a patch for the first time.
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