Release 0.81 version (#3864)

* Release 0.81 version

* Update NEWS.md

NEWS.md

@@ -3,9 +3,166 @@ XGBoost Change Log
 
 This file records the changes in xgboost library in reverse chronological order.
 
-## Master (2018.09.30)
-* BREAKING CHANGES
-  - External memory page files have changed, breaking backwards compatibility for temporary storage used during external memory training. This only affects external memory users upgrading their xgboost version - we recommend clearing all *.page files before resuming training. Model serialization is unaffected.
+## v0.81 (2018.11.04)
+### New feature: feature interaction constraints
+* Users are now able to control which features (independent variables) are allowed to interact by specifying feature interaction constraints (#3466).
+* [Tutorial](https://xgboost.readthedocs.io/en/release_0.81/tutorials/feature_interaction_constraint.html) is available, as well as [R](https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost/blob/9254c58e4dfff6a59dc0829a2ceb02e45ed17cd0/R-package/demo/interaction_constraints.R) and [Python](https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost/blob/9254c58e4dfff6a59dc0829a2ceb02e45ed17cd0/tests/python/test_interaction_constraints.py) examples.
+
+### New feature: learning to rank using scikit-learn interface
+* Learning to rank task is now available for the scikit-learn interface of the Python package (#3560, #3848). It is now possible to integrate the XGBoost ranking model into the scikit-learn learning pipeline.
+* Examples of using `XGBRanker` class is found at [demo/rank/rank_sklearn.py](https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost/blob/24a268a2e3cb17302db3d72da8f04016b7d352d9/demo/rank/rank_sklearn.py).
+
+### New feature: R interface for SHAP interactions
+* SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) is a unified approach to explain the output of any machine learning model. Previously, this feature was only available from the Python package; now it is available from the R package as well (#3636).
+
+### New feature: GPU predictor now use multiple GPUs to predict
+* GPU predictor is now able to utilize multiple GPUs at once to accelerate prediction (#3738)
+
+### New feature: Scale distributed XGBoost to large-scale clusters
+* Fix OS file descriptor limit assertion error on large cluster (#3835, dmlc/rabit#73) by replacing `select()` based AllReduce/Broadcast with `poll()` based implementation.
+* Mitigate tracker "thundering herd" issue on large cluster. Add exponential backoff retry when workers connect to tracker.
+* With this change, we were able to scale to 1.5k executors on a 12 billion row dataset after some tweaks here and there.
+
+### Major bug fix: learning to rank with XGBoost4J-Spark
+* Previously, `repartitionForData` would shuffle data and lose ordering necessary for ranking task.
+* To fix this issue, data points within each RDD partition is explicitly group by their group (query session) IDs (#3654). Also handle empty RDD partition carefully (#3750).
+
+### Major bug fix: early stopping fixed in XGBoost4J-Spark
+* Earlier implementation of early stopping had incorrect semantics and didn't let users to specify direction for optimizing (maximize / minimize)
+* A parameter `maximize_evaluation_metrics` is defined so as to tell whether a metric should be maximized or minimized as part of early stopping criteria (#3808). Also early stopping now has correct semantics.
+
+### API changes
+* Column sampling by level (`colsample_bylevel`) is now functional for `hist` algorithm (#3635, #3862)
+* Add `disable_default_eval_metric` parameter to disable default metric (#3606)
+* Experimental AVX support for gradient computation is removed (#3752)
+* XGBoost4J-Spark
+  - Add `rank:ndcg` and `rank:map` to supported objectives (#3697)
+* Python package
+  - Add `callbacks` argument to `fit()` function of sciki-learn API (#3682)
+  - Add `XGBRanker` to scikit-learn interface (#3560, #3848)
+  - Add `validate_features` argument to `predict()` function of scikit-learn API (#3653)
+  - Allow scikit-learn grid search over parameters specified as keyword arguments (#3791)
+  - Add `coef_` and `intercept_` as properties of scikit-learn wrapper (#3855). Some scikit-learn functions expect these properties.
+
+### Performance improvements
+* Address very high GPU memory usage for large data (#3635)
+* Fix performance regression within `EvaluateSplits()` of `gpu_hist` algorithm. (#3680)
+
+### Bug-fixes
+* Fix a problem in GPU quantile sketch with tiny instance weights. (#3628)
+* Fix copy constructor for `HostDeviceVectorImpl` to prevent dangling pointers (#3657)
+* Fix a bug in partitioned file loading (#3673)
+* Fixed an uninitialized pointer in `gpu_hist` (#3703)
+* Reshared data among GPUs when number of GPUs is changed (#3721)
+* Add back `max_delta_step` to split evaluation (#3668)
+* Do not round up integer thresholds for integer features in JSON dump (#3717)
+* Use `dmlc::TemporaryDirectory` to handle temporaries in cross-platform way (#3783)
+* Fix accuracy problem with `gpu_hist` when `min_child_weight` and `lambda` are set to 0 (#3793)
+* Make sure that `tree_method` parameter is recognized and not silently ignored (#3849)
+* XGBoost4J-Spark
+  - Make sure `thresholds` are considered when executing `predict()` method (#3577)
+  - Avoid losing precision when computing probabilities by converting to `Double` early (#3576)
+  - `getTreeLimit()` should return `Int` (#3602)
+  - Fix checkpoint serialization on HDFS (#3614)
+  - Throw `ControlThrowable` instead of `InterruptedException` so that it is properly re-thrown (#3632)
+  - Remove extraneous output to stdout (#3665)
+  - Allow specification of task type for custom objectives and evaluations (#3646)
+  - Fix distributed updater check (#3739)
+  - Fix issue when spark job execution thread cannot return before we execute `first()` (#3758)
+* Python package
+  - Fix accessing `DMatrix.handle` before it is set (#3599)
+  - `XGBClassifier.predict()` should return margin scores when `output_margin` is set to true (#3651)
+  - Early stopping callback should maximize metric of form `NDCG@n-` (#3685)
+  - Preserve feature names when slicing `DMatrix` (#3766)
+* R package
+  - Replace `nround` with `nrounds` to match actual parameter (#3592)
+  - Amend `xgb.createFolds` to handle classes of a single element (#3630)
+  - Fix buggy random generator and make `colsample_bytree` functional (#3781)
+
+### Maintenance: testing, continuous integration, build system
+* Add sanitizers tests to Travis CI (#3557)
+* Add NumPy, Matplotlib, Graphviz as requirements for doc build (#3669)
+* Comply with CRAN submission policy (#3660, #3728)
+* Remove copy-paste error in JVM test suite (#3692)
+* Disable flaky tests in `R-package/tests/testthat/test_update.R` (#3723)
+* Make Python tests compatible with scikit-learn 0.20 release (#3731)
+* Separate out restricted and unrestricted tasks, so that pull requests don't build downloadable artifacts (#3736)
+* Add multi-GPU unit test environment (#3741)
+* Allow plug-ins to be built by CMake (#3752)
+* Test wheel compatibility on CPU containers for pull requests (#3762)
+* Fix broken doc build due to Matplotlib 3.0 release (#3764)
+* Produce `xgboost.so` for XGBoost-R on Mac OSX, so that `make install` works (#3767)
+* Retry Jenkins CI tests up to 3 times to improve reliability (#3769, #3769, #3775, #3776, #3777)
+* Add basic unit tests for `gpu_hist` algorithm (#3785)
+* Fix Python environment for distributed unit tests (#3806)
+* Test wheels on CUDA 10.0 container for compatibility (#3838)
+* Fix JVM doc build (#3853)
+
+### Maintenance: Refactor C++ code for legibility and maintainability
+* Merge generic device helper functions into `GPUSet` class (#3626)
+* Re-factor column sampling logic into `ColumnSampler` class (#3635, #3637)
+* Replace `std::vector` with `HostDeviceVector` in `MetaInfo` and `SparsePage` (#3446)
+* Simplify `DMatrix` class (#3395)
+* De-duplicate CPU/GPU code using `Transform` class (#3643, #3751)
+* Remove obsoleted `QuantileHistMaker` class (#3761)
+* Remove obsoleted `NoConstraint` class (#3792)
+
+### Other Features
+* C++20-compliant Span class for safe pointer indexing (#3548, #3588)
+* Add helper functions to manipulate multiple GPU devices (#3693)
+* XGBoost4J-Spark
+  - Allow specifying host ip from the `xgboost-tracker.properties file` (#3833). This comes in handy when `hosts` files doesn't correctly define localhost.
+
+### Usability Improvements
+* Add reference to GitHub repository in `pom.xml` of JVM packages (#3589)
+* Add R demo of multi-class classification (#3695)
+* Document JSON dump functionality (#3600, #3603)
+* Document CUDA requirement and lack of external memory for GPU algorithms (#3624)
+* Document LambdaMART objectives, both pairwise and listwise (#3672)
+* Document `aucpr` evaluation metric (#3687)
+* Document gblinear parameters: `feature_selector` and `top_k` (#3780)
+* Add instructions for using MinGW-built XGBoost with Python. (#3774)
+* Removed nonexistent parameter `use_buffer` from documentation (#3610)
+* Update Python API doc to include all classes and members (#3619, #3682)
+* Fix typos and broken links in documentation (#3618, #3640, #3676, #3713, #3759, #3784, #3843, #3852)
+* Binary classification demo should produce LIBSVM with 0-based indexing (#3652)
+* Process data once for Python and CLI examples of learning to rank (#3666)
+* Include full text of Apache 2.0 license in the repository (#3698)
+* Save predictor parameters in model file (#3856)
+* JVM packages
+  - Let users specify feature names when calling `getModelDump` and `getFeatureScore` (#3733)
+  - Warn the user about the lack of over-the-wire encryption (#3667)
+  - Fix errors in examples (#3719)
+  - Document choice of trackers (#3831)
+  - Document that vanilla Apache Spark is required (#3854)
+* Python package
+  - Document that custom objective can't contain colon (:) (#3601)
+  - Show a better error message for failed library loading (#3690)
+  - Document that feature importance is unavailable for non-tree learners (#3765)
+  - Document behavior of `get_fscore()` for zero-importance features (#3763)
+  - Recommend pickling as the way to save `XGBClassifier` / `XGBRegressor` / `XGBRanker` (#3829)
+* R package
+  - Enlarge variable importance plot to make it more visible (#3820)
+
+### BREAKING CHANGES
+* External memory page files have changed, breaking backwards compatibility for temporary storage used during external memory training. This only affects external memory users upgrading their xgboost version - we recommend clearing all `*.page` files before resuming training. Model serialization is unaffected.
+
+### Known issues
+* Quantile sketcher fails to produce any quantile for some edge cases (#2943)
+* The `hist` algorithm leaks memory when used with learning rate decay callback (#3579)
+* Using custom evaluation funciton together with early stopping causes assertion failure in XGBoost4J-Spark (#3595)
+* Early stopping doesn't work with `gblinear` learner (#3789)
+* Label and weight vectors are not reshared upon the change in number of GPUs (#3794). To get around this issue, delete the `DMatrix` object and re-load.
+* The `DMatrix` Python objects are initialized with incorrect values when given array slices (#3841)
+* The `gpu_id` parameter is broken and not yet properly supported (#3850)
+
+### Acknowledgement
+**Contributors** (in no particular order): Hyunsu Cho (@hcho3), Jiaming Yuan (@trivialfis), Nan Zhu (@CodingCat), Rory Mitchell (@RAMitchell), Andy Adinets (@canonizer), Vadim Khotilovich (@khotilov), Sergei Lebedev (@superbobry)
+
+**First-time Contributors** (in no particular order): Matthew Tovbin (@tovbinm), Jakob Richter (@jakob-r), Grace Lam (@grace-lam), Grant W Schneider (@grantschneider), Andrew Thia (@BlueTea88), Sergei Chipiga (@schipiga), Joseph Bradley (@jkbradley), Chen Qin (@chenqin), Jerry Lin (@linjer), Dmitriy Rybalko (@rdtft), Michael Mui (@mmui), Takahiro Kojima (@515hikaru), Bruce Zhao (@BruceZhaoR), Wei Tian (@weitian), Saumya Bhatnagar (@Sam1301), Juzer Shakir (@JuzerShakir), Zhao Hang (@cleghom), Jonathan Friedman (@jontonsoup), Bruno Tremblay (@meztez), @Shiki-H, @mrgutkun, @gorogm, @htgeis, @jakehoare, @zengxy, @KOLANICH
+
+**First-time Reviewers** (in no particular order): Nikita Titov (@StrikerRUS), Xiangrui Meng (@mengxr), Nirmal Borah (@Nirmal-Neel)
+
 
 ## v0.80 (2018.08.13)
 * **JVM packages received a major upgrade**: To consolidate the APIs and improve the user experience, we refactored the design of XGBoost4J-Spark in a significant manner. (#3387)

jvm-packages/pom.xml

@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
 
     <groupId>ml.dmlc</groupId>
     <artifactId>xgboost-jvm</artifactId>
-    <version>0.81-SNAPSHOT</version>
+    <version>0.81</version>
     <packaging>pom</packaging>
     <name>XGBoost JVM Package</name>
     <description>JVM Package for XGBoost</description>

jvm-packages/xgboost4j-example/pom.xml

@@ -6,10 +6,10 @@
     <parent>
         <groupId>ml.dmlc</groupId>
         <artifactId>xgboost-jvm</artifactId>
-        <version>0.81-SNAPSHOT</version>
+        <version>0.81</version>
     </parent>
     <artifactId>xgboost4j-example</artifactId>
-    <version>0.81-SNAPSHOT</version>
+    <version>0.81</version>
     <packaging>jar</packaging>
     <build>
         <plugins>
@@ -26,7 +26,7 @@
         <dependency>
             <groupId>ml.dmlc</groupId>
             <artifactId>xgboost4j-spark</artifactId>
-            <version>0.81-SNAPSHOT</version>
+            <version>0.81</version>
         </dependency>
         <dependency>
             <groupId>org.apache.spark</groupId>
@@ -37,7 +37,7 @@
         <dependency>
             <groupId>ml.dmlc</groupId>
             <artifactId>xgboost4j-flink</artifactId>
-            <version>0.81-SNAPSHOT</version>
+            <version>0.81</version>
         </dependency>
         <dependency>
             <groupId>org.apache.commons</groupId>

jvm-packages/xgboost4j-flink/pom.xml

@@ -6,10 +6,10 @@
     <parent>
         <groupId>ml.dmlc</groupId>
         <artifactId>xgboost-jvm</artifactId>
-        <version>0.81-SNAPSHOT</version>
+        <version>0.81</version>
     </parent>
     <artifactId>xgboost4j-flink</artifactId>
-    <version>0.81-SNAPSHOT</version>
+    <version>0.81</version>
     <build>
         <plugins>
             <plugin>
@@ -26,7 +26,7 @@
         <dependency>
             <groupId>ml.dmlc</groupId>
             <artifactId>xgboost4j</artifactId>
-            <version>0.81-SNAPSHOT</version>
+            <version>0.81</version>
         </dependency>
         <dependency>
             <groupId>org.apache.commons</groupId>

jvm-packages/xgboost4j-spark/pom.xml

@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
     <parent>
         <groupId>ml.dmlc</groupId>
         <artifactId>xgboost-jvm</artifactId>
-        <version>0.81-SNAPSHOT</version>
+        <version>0.81</version>
     </parent>
     <artifactId>xgboost4j-spark</artifactId>
     <build>
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@
         <dependency>
             <groupId>ml.dmlc</groupId>
             <artifactId>xgboost4j</artifactId>
-            <version>0.81-SNAPSHOT</version>
+            <version>0.81</version>
         </dependency>
         <dependency>
             <groupId>org.apache.spark</groupId>

jvm-packages/xgboost4j/pom.xml

@@ -6,10 +6,10 @@
     <parent>
         <groupId>ml.dmlc</groupId>
         <artifactId>xgboost-jvm</artifactId>
-        <version>0.81-SNAPSHOT</version>
+        <version>0.81</version>
     </parent>
     <artifactId>xgboost4j</artifactId>
-    <version>0.81-SNAPSHOT</version>
+    <version>0.81</version>
     <packaging>jar</packaging>
 
     <dependencies>

python-package/xgboost/VERSION

@@ -1 +1 @@
-0.80
+0.81