PyMC v3.9.3 Release Notes

Release Date: 2020-08-11 // over 3 years ago
  • ๐Ÿ†• New features

    • Introduce optional arguments to pm.sample: mp_ctx to control how the processes for parallel sampling are started, and pickle_backend to specify which library is used to pickle models in parallel sampling when the multiprocessing context is not of type fork (see #3991).
    • Add sampler stats process_time_diff, perf_counter_diff and perf_counter_start, that record wall and CPU times for each NUTS and HMC sample (see #3986).
    • Extend keep_size argument handling for sample_posterior_predictive and fast_sample_posterior_predictive, to work on ArviZ InferenceData and xarray Dataset input values (see PR #4006 and issue #4004).
    • SMC-ABC: add the Wasserstein and energy distance functions. Refactor API, the distance, sum_stats and epsilon arguments are now passed pm.Simulator instead of pm.sample_smc. Add random method to pm.Simulator. Add option to save the simulated data. Improved LaTeX representation #3996.
    • SMC-ABC: Allow use of potentials by adding them to the prior term. #4016.

    ๐Ÿšง Maintenance

    • ๐Ÿ›  Fix an error on Windows and Mac where error message from unpickling models did not show up in the notebook, or where sampling froze when a worker process crashed (see #3991).
    • ๐Ÿ‘€ Require Theano >= 1.0.5 (see #4032).

    ๐Ÿ“š Documentation

    • ๐Ÿ‘€ Notebook on multilevel modeling has been rewritten to showcase ArviZ and xarray usage for inference result analysis (see #3963).

    ๐Ÿ“„ NB: The docs/* folder is still removed from the tarball due to an upload size limit on PyPi.

    ๐Ÿš€ Release manager for 3.9.3: Kyle Beauchamp (@kyleabeauchamp)