Release Notes

0.8.0

See the GitHub milestone for full change list.

Infrastructure Updates

  • 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

Algorithm Updates

  • 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

0.7.0

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.

0.6.1

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

0.6.0

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.

Internal Changes

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.

0.5.0

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:

  • Ben Frederickson’s Implicit library

0.3.0

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

0.2.0

A lot of fixes to get ready for RecSys.

0.1.0

Hello, world!