The ANDATA Tools Fall Release 4.4 focuses on stability and performance improvements that aim at making a more efficient workflow possible. A major new feature in Stipulator is the possibility to use an intermediate storage (cache) of processed signals in memory. Through this new feature it is possible to speed up a repeated generation of plots or execution of calculations based on the same data. Moreover, Stipulator's user interface is now built and refreshed faster. Furthermore, a generic logging framework has been introduced that writes interactions with the tools into a log file. This logging is already active in Brainer and is going to be extended to all ANDATA tools in further versions.

In the following we list the most significant new features introduced and issues fixed in this release with respect to the last released version 4.34.

Stipulator

A note on file compatibility: Stipulator files saved with version 4.4 can not be opened with previous Stipulator versions. Backwards compatibility was prevented by necessary changes in the internal data structures needed to maintain the user interface.

• Added possibility to cache processed signals to memory. This feature can significantly speed up the signal processing workflow. Please refer to the Stipulator User Guide (section "STP Processing", subsection "Cache management") through Help > Manual for more information.
• Improved the usability of attribute management (hide, show, reorder) accessible through View > Hide/show columns... when dealing with a large number of attributes. Since reordering attributes is much easier now, the possibility of dragging attribute columns has been switched off, because it could lead to user interface instability.
  
• Achieved a significant speed up in building and refreshing the Stipulator user interface in "Table View" mode
  
• Added an option to select which signal processing(s) to copy when using Processings > Copy...
• Changed the default extrapolation value for a punch in "Plain time series extraction" from 0 to Not-a-Number. Note that all existing Stipulator files will keep its current extraction settings, since this modification applies only to new Stipulator files. However, it is recommended to change this value to Not-a-Number (NaN) in existing Stipulator files as well.
• Added the possibility to save a Stipulator file even if "Drop/restore channel mapping when saving/loading file" is switched on in File > Properties... but the dropping cannot be done without loosing information. In this case, a warning dialog is shown to inform the user that the file is being saved without dropping any channel mapping.
• Prevented the possibility of two groups having the same name. On loading older Stipulator files, groups having non-unique names will be renamed.
• Prevented the possibility of two signal processings having the same name. On loading older Stipulator files signal processing sequences having non-unique names will be renamed.
• Fixed an issue with View > Show only selected causing incorrect operation on several case selection functions (for example, Cases > Select > By number..., Cases >Select > By category..., etc.)
• Fixed an issue with attributes of type relative link not being correctly resolved to an absolute path when signal processing level is set to Raw
• Fixed an issue with Cases > Import... when using an Excel file where column "Header" was interpreted incorrectly due to white spaces
• Fixed an issue with Cases > Import... being case sensitive on finding files if sub-folders are searched recursively for source files
• Fixed an issue with Stipulator files not being saved when "Drop/restore channel mapping when saving/loading file" is active and multiple search strings for reference channels are defined
• Fixed an issue with Signals > Show assignments... not working due to inconsistent dimensions in an internal data structure
  
• Fixed an issue with not being possible to set a case description using multiple lines of text
• Fixed an issue with not being possible to correctly cancel after having added a signal processing in the "Edit signal processing" dialog
• Fixed an issue with Stipulator showing columns in the wrong order after removing a large number of cases
• Fixed an issue when adding an action through the command line interface
• Fixed an issue with modifying multiple actions through the command line interface setting the given values to the wrong actions
• Fixed an issue with using File > Export > To Stipulator... when no valid target file name was provided
• Fixed an issue with File > Export > To Stipulator... exporting relative links as such, potentially preventing the target files being found. Relative links are now exported as absolute links after exporting to a new Stipulator file.
• Fixed an issue with index vectors saved to a group not having the expected dimension
• Fixed an issue with comparing two Stipulator files through menu File > Compare...
• Fixed an issue with the Stipulator extensions for Expectator not importing any data from Stipulator to the designated Expectator file when using Extensions > Expectator > Edit expectations... in Stipulator
• Fixed an issue with using matrix plot in MATLAB R2015b

Brainer

• Added a logging mechanism for used Brainer commands to a generic log file AndataTools.log. This functionality is going to be extended to Stipulator, Mapper and Expectator in future releases.
• Added a new parameter to hold the maximum value of each base model response over time in a Fusion Ensemble model
• Added a check for consistency of the loaded data matrix when opening a Brainer file saved with versions prior to 4.0. In some rare cases, parameters related to categorical variables were inconsistent. These inconsistencies are now fixed when loading, as far as this is possible. In this process, variables declared as categorical might be converted to numeric.

• Fixed an issue found when loading Brainer files containing models of type Long Short-Term Memory Network

Expectator

• Added support for multidimensional signal channels to expectation class BivariateRelationship
• Added a menu option ... > Duplicate selected expectation in addition to the already existing Expectations > Edit > Duplicate for duplicating expectations
• Fixed an issue with "Show Expectation Settings" being potentially active even when no expectation has been already defined
• Fixed an issue found when no expectation can be evaluated for the selected data
• Fixed an issue with expectations of type Compare2Model, SOMExpectationDistanceBased and SOMExpectationClusterBased potentially crashing when a machine learning model response has a different time base as its input features
• Fixed an issue with the Stipulator extensions for Expectator not importing any data from Stipulator to the designated Expectator file when using Extensions > Expectator > Edit expectations... in Stipulator

General

• Achieved a significant speed up on building several user dialogs on MATLAB R2018b
• Added possibility to extrapolate for filter functions sseval and sseval2attr
• Fixed an issue with filter function ssnormalizetimebase dealing inconsistently with empty input arguments
• Fixed an issue with filter function sssyncactions2channel using Not-a-Number for extrapolation to times before the initial time defined for an action
• Fixed an issue with group rename addressing the wrong group if group names had been filtered previously
• Fixed an issue with group rename crashing if multiple groups were selected