Alpha release

This is the alpha release of the Seldonian Engine. The code is still under active development, but it has reached a point where it is stable enough for more widespread usage. To install the alpha version of the Engine via PyPI, do:

pip install seldonian-engine==0.6.0

What is included in this version

• A command line Seldonian interface.
• Student's t-test for the confidence bound calculation
• Support for parametric supervised learning algorithms (binary classification and regression) as well as offline ("batch") reinforcement learning algorithms
• Parse tree capable of handling wide range of user-provided behavioral constraints. Constraints can consist of basic mathematical operations (+,-,/,*) operations and use any combination of (min,max,abs,exp) functions. Constraints can also include statistical functions like mean squared error and can filter these functions on any attribute (column) in the dataset
• Parse tree visualizer
• Efficient bound propagation in parse tree by limiting the number of confidence intervals that need to be calculated
• User can specify an arbitrary number of behavioral constraints for a single Seldonian algorithm
• User can specify split fraction between candidate selection and safety test
• Dataset loaders for CSV-formatted datasets
• Gradient descent with Adam optimizer module option for candidate selection
• Black box optimization using SciPy with barrier function module option for candidate selection
• Gradient descent visualizer
• Automatic differentiation using the "autograd" Python library for gradient descent.
• User can manually provide the gradient for a primary objective. User can also select from several built-in gradient functions which are often faster than using autograd.
• Example reinforcement learning policies supporting discrete and continuous observation spaces, such as softmax
• Modular design to make implementing user-defined models and constraints seamless for developers.
• Tutorials to help guide design.

Full Changelog: https://github.com/seldonian-toolkit/Engine/commits/alpha