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What's New in Altair AI Studio 2024.0.0?

Released: Apr 23, 2024

The following sections describe what's new in Altair AI Studio 2024.0.0

Features

  • Added new features for Interactive Decision Trees:
    • Added support for numerical target columns
    • Added the ability to edit existing splits within a tree, allowing to fully customize the distribution assignments and binning
    • Added a tree settings section to the wizard steps allowing to further customize how the decision tree is created and how the different columns are treated
    • Added toggle to switch how the distribution of class variables in a node is visualized: via a bar chart as before, or by showing the node distribution via node background coloring
    • Added an export to image feature which allows to easily save the full graph as an image file on disk
  • Improved installation process to be able to install and use multiple different versions of AI Studio simultaneously
    • This comes with distinct configuration folders for each version, so that changes to your settings etc are not breaking other installed versions as they may not be forward compatible with each other
    • The configuration folders are migrated from the previous version to a newly installed version on the first start-up of the new version
    • Uninstalling a specific version is possible without uninstalling the other ones
    • Note: Running multiple instances of the same AI Studio version is still not supported and can result in unintended side-effects!
  • Log improvements:
    • Added feature in the log view which enables collapsing identical messages into a single line with a counter icon to help declutter the log when many identical entries are generated
    • Added an easy and quick way to export the full AI Studio log file with a single click to a location of your choice. The log file contains all the information and errors logged by AI Studio, in greater detail than the Log panel itself actually displays.
      • This feature is available from an entry in the Help section of the top menu bar via “Save full AI Studio log…”
      • The action is also available from a button within the Log panel itself as well as the global search in the top right

Enhancements

  • Renamed RapidMiner Studio to Altair AI Studio
    • Adjusted user home base directory to ~/.AltairRapidMiner/AI Studio
    • Set default repository location to ~/Documents/AltairRapidMiner/AI Studio; existing repositories are not moved
    • Log file was renamed to ai-studio.log
    • Settings file was renamed to ai-studio-settings.properites, but still uses the old settings file if required (e.g. AI Hub)
  • The displayed version of AI Studio is now indicating the release year, to be in sync with all other Altair software offerings. Starting with this release, we are now releasing as 2024.0 for the first release in 2024.
    • Note: The engine version is keeping the "old" version schema, aka the engine version will be 10.4 - this is done to not break all existing extensions and their dependencies. You will only see the engine version in the actual process XML representation and operator compatibility settings.
    • The display version is also present in the Windows executables (installer, Ai Studio exe, uninstaller)
  • Improved start up time of AI Studio both in GUI and batch mode (as well as in engine mode, e.g. for AI Hub job containers) considerably
    • Exact impact depends on operating system, anti-virus tooling, and installed extensions, but for all tested configurations at least 10% faster start up time)
  • Added pass through input ports to Loop Collection and Loop Examples operators.
  • Added a new parameter to Read XML that allows parents and other ancestors in the xpaths for attributes but slows down the operator.
  • New default time zone parameter type added to Generate Attributes operator. The date_set, date_get, date_add, date_diff, date_to_time, date_parse_str and date_string functions now fall back to this time zone if no explicit time zone has been specified.
  • Added a new optional time zone input to the date_parse_str function. It is used if the date string itself does not contain time zone information.
  • Replaced date_str function in expression parser with date_string. The order of the parameters has changed and the time zone parameter is now optional.
  • Added new option in the preferences under System -> Network -> "Allow additional login before AI Hub authentication (Beta)". By enabling this option, an authentication dialog will appear before the AI Hub login page is displayed if necessary.
    • This solves the problem that in some network configurations (usually involving an enterprise proxy setup), an additional authentication is required before the AI Hub login can be accessed.
  • Improved the split heuristic for the command of Execute Program to keep quoted arguments intact
  • Using a new versioned working directory (user home) folder structure to allow multiple studio installs
  • Massively improved performance of the displayed Decision Tree in the Interactive Analysis view
  • Improved performance of the target column selection data table in the Interactive Analysis “Select Model” step
  • Improved the chart title for default visualizations generated for process result
  • Removed support for Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 as this product was retired by Microsoft
  • Removed the option to display legacy Simple Charts and Advanced Charts from the preferences dialog.
  • Removed the option to log into the Marketplace user account within the Marketplace dialog. Also, the virtually unused Purchased and Bookmarks tabs as well as related options have been removed.
  • Removed the Use Legacy Data Management option from the settings to toggle behavior from 7.4 and earlier and changed the affected operators to always use the improved data management being the standard since version 7.5
  • Upgrade the underlying h2o-3 library inside bundled H2O Extension
    • Improvements on K-Means, GBM, GLM, and LR algorithms as a consequence of upgrading the incorporated h2o-3 library to 3.42.0.1.
    • Upgrade log4j dependencies to resolve CVE’s in previous versions

Bugfixes

  • Fixed an issue where Gradient Boosted Trees in Auto Model would not show up in the results
  • Fixed preview in last step of Read XML import configuration wizard
  • The Read XML import configuration wizard is no longer broken when going from Step 5 to previous steps
  • Fixed the Read Excel operator to use the time zone parameter when parsing dates
  • The values of the locale parameter of the operators Read CSV, Read Excel, Read XML, Nominal to Date and Date to Nominal are no longer translated into the language specified in the Settings
  • Fixed issue which caused some key combinations to be triggered twice on macOS, e.g. for disabling an operator
  • Fixed file chooser file type column displaying values from different files in macOS
  • Fixed file chooser icons when browsing remote files, e.g. on AWS S3
  • Removed some unnecessary warnings when using Interactive Analysis
  • Fixed an issue that sometimes prevented floating call-to-action banners from appearing
  • Fixed extension icons not showing properly in Incompatible Extensions dialog on start-up

Development

  • Upgraded build system to Gradle 8
  • What in earlier versions was achieved by a legacy RapidMiner Development edition license, is now achieved by the presence of a valid development.lic file in the licenses folder. The most prominent example affected is the setting to granting development permissions to unsigned extensions.
  • With the new versioned working directory (user home) structure there are adjustments that need to be done in extensions in order to be compatible.
    • If the extension is using one of the following folders, these specific folders must be obtained by the new DirectoryService specific get methods: .altair_licensing, extensions, licenses, managed, repositories, shared data (e.g. the extensions folder must now be accessed via DirectoryService.getExtensionsDir() )
    • Some specific and widely used files (e.g. settings) can be obtained by specific get methods, e.g. DirectoryService.getStudioStettings()
    • All other working directory (directory and file) accesses should be resolved via DirectoryService.resolveWorkingDir()
    • The FileSystemService is now deprecated and the usages should be replaced with the new DirectoryService.
  • Added new paramater type com.rapidminer.parameter.ParameterTypeDateTimeString, which can take an additional date time format parameter to pick a date and time as a parameter
  • Upgraded JxBrowser to version 7.38.0 for HTML5-based UIs.
    • If you create browsers from custom engines, please call BrowserFactory#registerBrowser(Browser) afterwards to enable them to show up in the browser debugging UI
  • Removed many old deprecated (mostly limited to deprecated before than 7.0) methods and classes.
    • Also removed some very old methods which were not officially deprecated but:
      • were discouraged from use since version 5.x in JD (but were not officially deprecated)
      • did not do anything
      • were completely broken and obsolete
  • Added a JVM Option rapidminer.general.timezone that is used as a default value when no settings file or similar defines the time zone setting
  • Added more functionality to DateTools replacing the now deprecated date time related functionality in the Tools

Known Issues

  • If an extensions.xml exists in the .RapidMiner folder (or custom home), the migration will fail. This file must either be renamed or deleted before starting AI Studio.
  • On macOS:
    • When running Studio for the first time, if a migration is happening, the application name changes to “java”
    • When creating a pinned short cut from the first run, it will not work after Studio was closed
      • Workaround: Restart Studio and create a shortcut from there, or create it directly from the Applications folder
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