Tinytopics

Improvements

- Increased the speed of `generate_synthetic_data()` significantly by using
direct mixture sampling, which leverages the properties of multinomial
distributions (21).

This change makes simulating data at the scale of 100K x 100K
more feasible. Although the approaches before and after are mathematically
equivalent, the data generated with the same seed in previous versions and
this version onward will be bitwise different.

Documentation

- Use `pip` and `python3` in command line instructions consistently.

Breaking changes

- tinytopics now requires Python >= 3.10 to use PEP 604 style shorthand syntax
for union and optional types (14).

Typing

- Refactor type hints to use more base abstract classes, making them less
limiting to specific implementations (14).

Testing

- Add unit tests for all functions using pytest, with a GitHub Actions workflow
to run tests under Linux and Windows (18).

Improvements

- Update articles to simplify import syntax using `import tinytopics as tt` (16).
- Close precise figure handles in plot functions instead of the current figure (18).

Bug fixes

- Plot functions now correctly use string and list type color palette inputs
when specified (do not call them as functions) (18).

Improvements

- Refactor the code to use a more functional style and add type hints
to improve code clarity (9).

New features

- Add `scale_color_tinytopics()` to support the coloring need for
arbitrary number of topics (4).

Improvements

- Simplify hyperparameter tuning by adopting modern stochastic gradient methods.
`fit_model()` now uses a combination of the AdamW optimizer (with weight
decay) and the cosine annealing (with warm restarts) scheduler (2).

Bug fixes

- Fix "Structure plot" y-axis range issue by adding a `normalize_rows` argument
to `plot_structure()` for normalizing rows so that they all sum exactly to 1,
and explicitly setting the y-axis limit to [0, 1]. (1).

Documentation

- Add text data topic modeling example article (7).

Improvements

- Reorder arguments in plotting functions to follow conventions.