RcppHNSW 0.6.0

New features

• Updated hnswlib to version 0.8.0.

New features

• Updated hnswlib to version 0.7.0. Note that I made some very minor changes to the code to silence some compiler warnings. These changes have been submitted up-stream to the hnswlib project.
• For high-dimensional data, there can be a noticeable CPU overhead in copying data out of the non-contiguous memory regions when row-wise data is used. If you wish to provide data where each column of the input matrix contains an item to be indexed/search then see the following additions to the API:
  • For the class-based API: addItemsCol, getAllNNsCol and getAllNNsListCol are the column-based equivalents of addItems, getAllNNs and getAllNNsList, respectively. Note that the returned nearest neighbor data from getAllNNsCol and getAllNNsListCol are also stored by column, i.e. the matrices have dimensions k x n where k is the number of neighbors, and n the number of items in the data being searched.
  • For the function-based API, a new parameter byrow has been added to hnsw_knn, hnsw_build and hnsw_search. By default this is set to TRUE and indicates that the items in the input matrix are found in each row. To pass column-stored items, set byrow = FALSE. Any matrices returned by hnsw_search and hnsw_knn will now follow the convention provided by the value of byrow: i.e. if byrow = FALSE, the matrices contain nearest neighbor information in each column.
• new method: getItems, which returns a matrix of the data vectors in the index with the specified integer identifiers. From a feature request made by d4tum (#18).

Bug fixes and minor improvements

• The progress parameter in the functional interface no longer does anything. When verbose = TRUE, a progress bar is no longer shown.
• Due to a breaking change in roxygen2 7.0.0, there was a missing package alias in the documentation.

Bug fixes and minor improvements

• Rolled back to hnswlib v0.4.0 due to valgrind problems in v0.6.2.

New features

• Updated hnswlib to version 0.6.2.

Bug fixes and minor improvements

• Minor future-proofing of licensing: RcppHNSW is now GPLv3 or later, rather than GPLv3 only.

Ok, depending on your point of view this might be considered a re-license. This package was always intended to be GPL3 or later, but the License specified GPL3 could be seen as implying GPL3 only. The new license specifier (GPL (>= 3)) hopefully makes the intention less ambiguous.

Again, no code changes from v0.3.

Nobody panic, RcppHNSW has not been relicensed. Issue #13 noted that an internal file based on RcppParallel added for version 0.3.0 was licensed under GPL2 only. RcppParallel (and hence that derived file) has now been relicensed as GPL2 or later, so with an update to the licensing notice in that file, RcppHNSW is compliant again. No code changes have occurred.

Subsequent releases of RcppHNSW on CRAN for the package as a whole will remain GPL3+. Thank you @smoe for bringing this to my attention.

New features

• Multi-threading support is now available. Use the setNumThreads method if using the object-based API, and the n_threads parameter in the hnsw_* function API. For finer control, a setGrainSize and grain_size option is also available in the object and function interface respectively. Thank you to Dmitriy Selivanov for a lot of the work on this.
• Updated hnswlib to version 0.4.0.

Bug fixes and minor improvements

• Setting verbose = TRUE now has incurs substantially less computational overhead associated with calculating the progress bar. Thank you to Samuel Granjeaud for spotting the problem and coming up with various solutions.
• New parameter: progress. By default this is set to "bar" and will show the progress bar when verbose = TRUE. If you want a more terse output, set progress = NULL. progress = NULL will eventually be the default setting: for now, verbose = TRUE will get you the progress bar by default for backwards compatibility.
• No progress bar will be shown if you have less than 50 items to process.

New features

• Updated hnswlib to nmslib/hnswlib@c5c38f0 (20 September 2019).
• A new method, markDeleted, that will remove an object from being retrieved from the index.
• A new method, resizeIndex, that allows the index to be increased without having to save and reload the index.
• A new method, size is available for the index objects and reports the number of items added to the index.

Bug fixes and minor improvements

• hnsw_search would stop if the number of rows in the input matrix was smaller than k. This check has been removed. Note that the correct behavior is to ensure that k is smaller than or equal to index$size() where index is the index you are searching. Because the size() method is new to this version, to preserve compatibility with old indexes, this check hasn't been added to hnsw_search. If this matters to you, manually compare index$size() with k before running hnsw_search. An error will be thrown if k neighbors can't be found in the index. Thank you to Yuxing Liao for spotting this and the pull request to remove the check.

Initial CRAN release.

This release marks what seems like a fairly stable point in development of the initial code.