SciPy 0.12.0 Release Notes ¶

Contents

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 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.

axis argument added to `scipy.stats.scoreatpercentile`¶

The function scipy.stats.scoreatpercentile has been given an axis argument. The default argument is axis=None, which means the calculation is done on the flattened array. Before this change, scoreatpercentile would act as if axis=0 had been given. Code using scoreatpercentile with a multidimensional array will need to add axis=0 to the function call to preserve the old behavior. (This API change was not noticed until long after the release of 0.12.0.)

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 +
Matthew R Goodman
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 +
Tim Leslie
Richard Lindsley +
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 +
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 +
True Price +
Nicky van Foreest
Jacob Vanderplas
Patrick Varilly
Daniel Velkov +
Pauli Virtanen
Stefan van der Walt
Warren Weckesser

A total of 75 people contributed to this release. People with a “+” by their names contributed a patch for the first time.