- Adds `zipline.pipeline.Pipeline`, a new user-facing class for managing
pipelines of Modeling API expressions.
- Adds `attach_pipeline` and `drain_pipeline` as API methods
- Removes `add_factor` and `add_filter` as API methods. These have been
replaced two new methods on `Pipeline`: `add`, and `apply_screen`.
- Adding a `Filter` as a column no longer implicitly truncates rows from
the Modelling API output. It simply causes a new column, of dtype
`bool` to show up in the output. Removal of rows is now handled by the
new `apply_screen` method of `Pipeline`.
- Refactors the existing Modeling API tests to reflect the new APIs.
- Fixes an error where Modeling API data known as of the close of `day
N` would be shown to algorithms during `before_trading_start` as of
the close of the same day. Algorithms should now only receive data
during `before_trading_start/handle_data` that was known as of the
simulation time at which the function would be called.
- All Term instances now have a `mask` attribute that must be a `Filter`
or an instance of `AssetExists()`. `mask` can be used to specify that
a Factor should be computed in a manner that ignores the values that
were not `True` in the mask.
- Changed the interface for `FFCLoader.load_adjusted_array` and
`Term._compute` from `(columns, mask)`, with mask as a DataFrame, to
`(columns, dates, assets, mask)`, where mask is a numpy array. This
is primarily to avoid having to reconstruct extra DataFrames when
using masks produced by non `AssetExists` filters.
- Adds `BoundColumn.latest`, which gives the most-recently-known value
of a column.
- Add an `ascending=True` keyword to `rank()`.
- Add `top(N)` and `bottom(N)` methods to Factor. These return Filters
that pass the top and bottom N elements each day.
- Add a slightly faster path for rank(method='ordinal'). I had
originally thought the fast path was 2-3x faster because I had my
benchmark data axes flipped. The actual speedup is only 5-10%, which
means it probably wasn't worth the effort to Cythonize...but we have a
slightly faster version now so we might as well use it.
- Refactor test_filter and test_factor to make it easier to implement
and test transformations on factors. These tests now subclass
BaseFFCTestCase, which provides facilities for passing a dict of terms
and an "initial_workspace", the values for which are used by
SimpleFFCEngine rather than needing to manually manage the inputs and
outputs of each term.