The ANDATA Tools Fall 2019 Release 4.5 introduces exciting new features as well as significant improvements in stability and speed that help in achieving a robust and efficient workflow.

Stipulator has benefited from the greatest amount of development efforts, which focused on the implementation of new features, like the interaction panel and the raw attribute selectors, on speedup, with a remarkable increase on performance achieved in signal processing, in data extraction or in plotting data as well as in the responsiveness of the graphical user interface, and on stability and robustness, with different consistency checks put into place to ensure a consistent data processing flow accompanying the usage of the tool.

Continuous development in Brainer and Mapper has focused on tool stability. Extensive changes are planned for Brainer for the next releases.

A fair amount of development efforts have been focused on Expectator. A newly developed interface and extensive tool refactoring facilitates a flexible definition and implementation of generic post processing tasks. The standard report has been redesigned with focus on clarity and easy navigation.

In the following we list the most significant new features introduced and issues fixed in this release with respect to the last released version 4.42.

Stipulator

New features

• (STP-413) Added the possibility to select cases by arbitrary combination of raw attribute values. The so-called raw attribute selectors allow identifying cases that meet user defined criteria on raw attribute values. Raw attribute selectors are stored in the Stipulator project. Please refer to section "Cases" > "Select by raw attributes" in the Stipulator User Guide for further details.
• (STP-457) Added a new interaction panel to Stipulator main user interface that allows performing fast and efficient interactive select and show operations on cases. Filtering cases by number, name and description is possible. Groups and column sets defined in the Stipulator project are also available, as well as the newly added raw attribute selectors. The interaction panel can be activated via toolbar icon or in menu View > Options by activating option "Interaction panel visible". Please refer to section "Basics" > "Side panel" in the Stipulator User Guide for further details.
• (STP-590) Implemented a new plot to compare signals based on multiple signal processing chains. This plot is available in Analysis > Plot signals > Based on multiple processings. Please refer to section "Data analysis" > "Signals and actions" in the Stipulator User Guide for further details.

Performance, robustness and usability

• (STP-84) Reduced time needed for analyzing cases with outsourced signals by optionally reading only those channels and attributes used in processing. Please refer to section "Processing" in the Stipulator User Guide for further details.
• (STP-528) Improved speed and robustness of signal caching. This feature is now activated by default. Please refer to section "Processing" > "Cache management" in the Stipulator User Guide for further details.
• (STP-573) Added a feature to automatically disable signal caching if a MATLAB parallel pool is active, because of related potential performance losses.
• (STP-458, STP-460) Reduced time needed to generate plots in Analysis > Plot signals > By channel..., Analysis > Plot signals > By channel synchronized... and Analysis > Plot signals > By case.
• (STP-453, STP-511) Improved overall responsiveness of Stipulator main user interface in operations that require refreshing its contents.
• (STP-361) Reduced computation time needed for Extraction.
• (STP-310, STP-603) Improved robustness and reporting of errors found in signal processing for single cases in Extraction.
• (STP-499) Consistency checks performed at the beginning of the extraction process contribute to an early detection of systematic configuration errors (wrong file paths, inconsistent processing, etc.) in order to avoid potentially long calculations.
• (STP-502) Improved robustness and flexibility when pasting cases with Cases > Copy and Cases > Paste to a different Stipulator project by keeping track of reference channels, search strings and values of categorical attributes. The operation provides more detailed feedback to the user as well.
• (STP-112) Reduced memory consumption in Attributes > Copy....
• (STP-500) Improved responsiveness of toolbar context menus to select signal processing and signal processing level.
• (STP-424) Attributes of type "Link" do not need to be explicitly set to absolute or relative by the user. The usual functions related to Link attributes remain available in Attributes > Links.
• (STP-545) Designed a more usable interface for plot Analysis > Plot actions > Actions vs. cases.
• (STP-100) Added Expectator extensions to a new menu Expectator in the main menu, in case Expectator is installed. These extensions were found in Extensions > Expectator in previous Stipulator versions.
• (STP-568, STP-569) Prevented Cases > Select > By name... and Cases > Select > By description... to suggest the same search string in subsequent calls. Each command keeps track of its previous call independently from each other and suggests the last used string as a new search pattern.
• (STP-530) Supported adding a prefix to selected case names in Cases > Set > Add text to name....
• (STP-548) Prevented potentially large amounts of data to be kept in memory after closing a Stipulator project if copy operations have been performed before.

Bug fixes

• (STP-428) Resolved an issue found when computing distances with non-equidistant time series data.
• (STP-504 / SI-155) Resolved an issue found on Signals > Find defaults... when reference channels are added with "Add searchstrings" in dialog "Edit case".
• (STP-516 / SI-160) Fixed wrong display after reordering attributes in a column set in View > Hide/Show columns....
• (STP-526) Resolved an issue with renamed attributes used in a column set in View > Hide/Show columns....
• (STP-570) Fixed wrong trajectory plots displayed in Analysis > Plot signals > 2D trajectories and Analysis > Plot signals > 3D trajectories when perturbations are defined in signal processing.
• (STP-524) Resolved an issue that prevented opening dialog Processings > Edit... if a used custom filter is not available.
• (STP-520) Fixed an issue that prevented aborting dialogs Cases > Set style > Row color and Cases > Set style > Plot color with "Cancel".
• (STP-556, STP-565, STP-598) Resolved several issues with dialogs File > Reference channels > Edit... and File > Reference attributes > Edit... having an inconsistent slider for vertical scrolling.
• (STP-571) Fixed an issue that prevented pasting reference channels with File > Reference channels > Paste when cases are already pasted.
• (STP-537) Resolved issues found in File > Reference attributes > Import from file... and streamlined behavior to match that of File > Reference channels > Import from file... when using signal data stored in a .mat file.
• (STP-574) Fixed an issue found in Cases > Select > By name... and Cases > Select > By description... when an empty string is used.
• (STP-588) Resolved an issue found when trying to load a file with the wrong file extension in File > Open....
• (STP-536) Fixed an issue found in File > Save as... when providing a file name without extension.
• (STP-596) Resolved wrong message displayed when using Expectator > Evaluate expectations... if expectations do not match cases in Stipulator.
• (STP-601) Fixed issues found when adding reference attributes with the same name than an existing action. Reference attributes cannot be created with a name that is already used by an action.

Other features

• (STP-503, STP-562) Implemented many new stipulator('set*', ...) commands with improved consistency and robustness to be used from the command line. Please refer to the Stipulator User Guide for further details.
• (STP-498) Checked and enforced uniqueness of group names in command stipulator('setgroups', ...).
• (STP-317 / SI-176) Checked and enforced uniqueness of signal processing names in command stipulator('setprocessings', ...).
• (STP-505) Fixed an issue with command stipulator('selectbyinput', ...) selecting the wrong cases when used from the command line.
• (STP-523 / SI-159) Streamlined syntax of command stipulator('selectsignals', ...). This command assumes the current signal processing level set in Stipulator if the first input argument is empty and a channel index is provided as second input argument.
• (STP-623 / SI-178) Improved robustness and checked consistency of input arguments passed to command stipulator('setextractionproperties', ...). This command uses now a more intuitive 'name', value syntax when called with two input arguments.

Brainer

• (BRN-366) Improved responsiveness and prevented wrong data displayed in dialog Models > Training settings....
• (BRN-412 / SI-177) Added user feedback that prevents starting a feature selection process when more than one input set is defined.
• (BRN-313) Fixed an issue when importing a data matrix that is compatible with the one in the Brainer project.
• (BRN-319) Resolved an issue where Brainer falsely warns about input sets changing after removing parameters.
• (BRN-308) Fixed an issue with menu entries being duplicated in seldom cases.
• (BRN-369) Resolved an issue with Postprocessing > Single Model > Out of bag error feature importance analysis with Random Forests models.
• (BRN-411) Fixed an issue found when deleting an input set that is not used in model training.

Mapper

• (MPR-75) Added the possibility to select data through a new search field in dialog "Power Data Selection". Please refer to the Mapper User Guide for further details.
• (MPR-120) Fixed an issue with Maps > Adapt throwing an error if no adaptation settings are defined in Maps > Adapt properties....
• (BRN-366) Improved responsiveness and prevented wrong data displayed in dialog Maps > Train settings....

Expectator

• (EXP-273) Refactored the post processing interface to allow for a flexible and customizable presentation of results after checking expectations on data.
• (EXP-274) Redesigned layout and usability of the default report generated by Expectator after checking expectations on data.
• (EXP-246 / SI-141) Implemented a new expectation method ScalarWithinInterval to check if a scalar attribute value is within a given interval. Please refer to section "Expectation methods" in the Expectator User Guide for further details.
• (EXP-318) Increased speed when generating plots from expectation method BivariateRelationship.
• (EXP-262 / SI-145) Resolved an issue with View > Expectations > Sort and View > Expectations > Reorder throwing an error if duplicated expectation names are found.
• (EXP-256 / SI-136) Prevented Expectator to change the zoom factor if existing sampling points are changed manually while calibrating expectations.
• (EXP-319) Fixed an issue with Expectator reporting wrong channels used by expectation method BivariateRelationship.
• (EXP-288) Expectator commands used in the command line interface are case-insensitive. Please refer to the Expectator User Guide for the documentation of Expectator's command line interface.

General

• (MISC-124) Implemented new classes for continuous and discrete wavelet transformations.
• (SST-121) Added filter function sscwtcoeffs to compute coefficients from a continuous wavelet transformation or attributes from a whole scalogram.
• (SST-126) Added new signal characteristics in sscalcsignalcharacteristics: sum of powers of 2 ('pow2sum'), root mean square ('rms') and root sum of squares ('rssq').  Both 'rms' and 'rssq' require MATLAB's Signal Processing Toolbox available.
• (SST-130) Reduced computation time required by ssfilter.
• (SST-141) Resolved an issue found in ssfilter when using channel frequency class filters (CFC*) on signals that contain Not-a-Number (NaN) values.
• (MISC-148) Fixed an issue found with several selection dialogs returning wrong indices when entries are duplicated in a filtered list.