- 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.
This patch lays the groundwork for a compute engine designed to
facilitate construction of factor-based universe screening and portfolio
allocation. It contains:
A new module, `zipline.modelling`, containing entities that can be used
to express computations as dependency graphs. Each node in such a graph
is an instance of the base `Term` class, defined in
`zipline.modelling.term`. Dependency graphs are executed by instances
of `FFCEngine`, defined in `zipline.modelling.engine`.
A new module, `zipline.data.ffc`, containing loaders and dataset
definitions for inputs to the modelling API.
New `TradingAlgorithm` api methods: `add_factor`, and `add_filter`.
These methods can only be called from `initialize`, and are used to
inform the algorithm that each day it should compute the given terms.
Computed factor results are made available through a new attribute of
the `data` object in `before_trading_start` and `handle_data`. Computed
filter results control which assets are available in the factor matrix
on each day.
Scott Sanderson