Changelog

Changelog#

[0.2.4] - 2025-09-18#

  • Add support for Python 3.13, minimum version is now 3.10.

[0.2.3] - 2025-06-07#

Breaking changes

  • All returned nodes are now forced to be at least epsilon apart, rather than allowing some to be the next allowable floating point number. This allows room for mutations. Epsilon has been changed to 1e-10 from 1e-6, to minimise the impact, as this has the potential to (marginally) change the dates of internal (fixed) sample nodes.

  • Multiple mutations at the same site above the same node are now spaced out evenly in time, rather than placed at identical times.

[0.2.2] - 2025-03-30#

Features

  • An allow_unary flag (False by default) has been added to all methods.

  • A set_metadata flag has been added so that node and mutation metadata can be omitted, saved (default), or overwritten even if this requires changing the schema.

  • An environment variable TSDATE_ENABLE_NUMBA_CACHE can be set to cache JIT compiled code, speeding up loading time (useful when testing).

  • The time taken for running tsdate is now recorded in the provenance data

  • Historical samples (sample nodes with time > 0) are now allowed in the tree sequence.

Documentation

  • Various fixes in documentation, including documenting returned fits.

Breaking changes

  • The return_posteriors argument has been removed and replaced with return_fit. An instance of one of two previously internal classes, ExpectationPropagation and BeliefPropagation, are now returned when return_fit=True, and posteriors can be obtained using fit.node_posteriors().

  • Topology-only dating (setting mutation_rate=None) has been removed for tree sequences of more than one tree, as tests have found that span-weighting the conditional coalescent causes substantial bias.

  • The trim_telomeres parameter in the tsdate.preprocess_ts() function has been renamed to erase_flanks, to match tinfer.preprocess(). The previous name is kept as a deprecated alias.

[0.2.1] - 2024-07-31#

Bugfixes

  • Minor bug fixed with final step of algorithm (path rescaling).

Features

  • Initial support for dating with unphased (or poorly phased) singleton mutations via singletons_phased=False option. The API is preliminary and may change.

Documentation

  • Fixed description of priors for variational gamma method, which were referred to a ‘flat’ or improper but are actually empirical Bayes priors on root node ages, fit by expectation maximization.

[0.2.0] - 2024-06-10#

Bugfixes

  • Variational gamma uses a rescaling approach which helps considerably if e.g. population sizes vary over time

  • Variational gamma does not use mutational area of branches, but average path length, which reduces bias in tree sequences containing polytomies

Breaking changes

  • The default method has been changed to variational_gamma.

  • Variational gamma uses an improper (flat) prior, and therefore no longer needs population_size specifying.

  • The standalone preprocess_ts function also applies the split_disjoint_nodes method, which creates extra nodes but improves dating accuracy.

  • Json metadata for mean time and variance in the mutation and node tables is now saved with a suitable schema. This means json.loads() is no longer needed to read it.

  • The mutation_rate and population_size parameters are now keyword-only, and therefore these parameter names need to be explicitly typed out.

  • The ignore-oldest option has been removed from the command-line interface, as it is no longer very helpful with new tsinfer output, which has the root node split. The option is still accessible from the Python API.

[0.1.7] - 2024-01-11#

Bugfixes

  • In variational gamma, rescale messages at end of each iteration to avoid numerical instability.

[0.1.6] - 2024-01-07#

Breaking changes

  • The standalone preprocess_ts function now defaults to not removing unreferenced individuals, populations, or sites, aiming to change the tree sequence tables as little as possible.

  • get_dates (previously undocumented) has been removed, as posteriors can be obtained using return_posterior. The normalize terminology previously used in get_dates is changed to standardize to better reflect the fact that the maximum (not sum) is one, and exposed via the outside_standardize parameter.

  • The Ne argument to date has been deprecated (although it is still in the API for backward compatibility). The equivalent argument population_size should be used instead.

  • The CLI -verbosity flag no longer takes a number, but uses action="count", so -v turns verbosity to INFO level, whereas -vv turns verbosity to DEBUG level.

  • The return_posteriors=True option with method="inside_outside" previously returned a dict that included keys start_time and end_time, giving the impression that the posterior for node age is discretized over time slices in this algorithm. In actuality, the posterior is discretized atomically over time points, so start_time and end_time have been replaced by a single key time.

  • The return_posteriors=True option with method="maximization" is no longer accepted (previously simply returned None)

  • Python 3.7 is no longer supported.

Features

  • A new continuous-time method, "variational_gamma" has been introduced, which uses an iterative expectation propagation approach. Tests show this increases accuracy, especially at older times. A Laplace approximation and damping are used to ensure numerical stability. After testing, the node priors used in this method are based on a global mixture prior, which can be refined during iteration. Future releases may switch to using this as the default method.

  • Priors may be calculated using a piecewise-constant effective population trajectory, which is implemented in the demography.PopulationSizeHistory class. The population_size argument to date accepts either a single scalar effective population size, or a PopulationSizeHistory instance.

  • Added support and wheels for Python 3.11

  • The .date() function is now a wrapper for the individual dating methods (accessible using tsdate.core.dating_methods), which can be called independently. (e.g. tsdate.inside_outside(...)). This makes it easier to document method-specific options. The API docs have been revised accordingly. Provenance is now saved with the name of the method used as the celled command, rather than "command": "date".

  • Major re-write of documentation (now at https://tskit.dev/tsdate/docs/), to use the standard tskit jupyterbook framework.

Bugfixes

  • The returned posteriors when return_posteriors=True now return actual probabilities (scaled so that they sum to one) rather than standardized “probabilities” whose maximum value is one.

  • The population size is saved in provenance metadata (as a dictionary if it is a PopulationSizeHistory instance)

  • preprocess_ts always records provenance as being from the preprocess_ts command, even if no gaps are removed. The command now has a (rarely used) delete_intervals parameter, which is normally filled out and saved in provenance (as it was before). If no gap deletion is done, the param is saved as []

[0.1.5] - 2022-06-07#

Features

  • Added the time_units parameter to tsdate.date, allowing users to specify the time units of the dated tree sequence. Default is "generations".

  • Added the return_posteriors parameter to tsdate.date. If True, the function returns a tuple of (dated_ts, posteriors).

  • mutation_rate is now a required argument in tsdate.date and tsdate.get_dates

  • tsdate returns an error if users attempt to date an unsimplified tree sequence.

  • Updated tsdate citation information to cite the recent Science paper

  • Built wheel on Python 3.10

[0.1.4] - 2021-06-30#

Features

  • The algorithm now operates completely in unscaled time (in units of generations) under the hood, which means that tsdate.build_prior_grid now requires the parameter Ne.

  • Users now have access to the marginal posterior distributions on node age by running tsdate.get_dates, though this is undocumented for now.

Bugfixes

  • A fix to the way likelihoods are added should eliminate numerical errors that are sometimes encountered when dating very large tree sequences.

[0.1.3] - 2021-02-15#

Features

  • Two new methods, tsdate.sites_time_from_ts and tsdate.add_sampledata_times, support inference of tree sequences from non-contemporaneous samples.

  • New tutorial on inferring tree sequences from modern and historic/ancient samples explains how to use these functions in conjunction with tsinfer.

  • tsdate.preprocess_ts supports dating inferred tree sequences which include large, uninformative stretches (i.e. centromeres and telomeres). Simply run this function on the tree sequence before dating it.

  • ignore_outside is a new parameter in the outside pass which tells tsdate to ignore edges from oldest root (these edges are often of low quality in tsinfer inferred tree sequences)

  • Development environment is now equivalent to other tskit-dev projects

[0.1.2] - 2020-02-28#

  • Improve user experience with more progress bars and logging.

  • Slightly change traversal method in outside and outside maximization algorithms, this should only affect inference on inferred tree sequences with large numbers of nodes at the same frequency.

  • Improve reporting of current project version

  • Use appdirs for default caching location

  • Prevent dating tree sequences with dangling nodes

[0.1.1] - 2020-02-25#

  • Bugfix release: resolve issue with precalculating prior values.

€# [0.1.0] - 2020-02-24

Early Alpha release made available via PyPI for community testing and evaluation.

Please don’t use this version in published works.

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