Gpflow

This patch release fixes a number of identified issues.

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

* Support pickling Scipy optimizers with a non-empty compile cache
* Allow setting a prior for A in the `Linear` mean function
* Avoid rounding small values in kernel summary printout
* Test against Tensorflow 2.15

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from:

JSchmiegel, uri-granta

This release adds caching of compiled graphs inside the Scipy optimizer, and adds support
for returning loss history. It also adds supports for Python 3.11.

Major Features and Improvements

* Support returning loss history with Scipy optimizer.
* Scipy minimize wrapper caches compiled graphs and re-uses them if called with the same arguments.
This functionality can be disabled by setting the new `compile_cache_size` argument to 0.

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

* Support and test with Python 3.11
* Test against a 'production' environment (in addition to 'min' and 'max' environments).

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from:

khurram-ghani, jesnie, uri-granta

A small fix to ensure support for (and testing with) TensorFlow 2.12.

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

* Support and test with TensorFlow 2.12

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from:

uri-granta

The main focus of this release is to provide users control over arguments for `tf.function`
compilation inside the Scipy minimize wrapper. It also adds support for a new categorical kernel.

Major Features and Improvements

* Added a new categorical kernel that implements categorical variables by mapping them to values in
a latent space. (2055)
* Added support for passing `tf.function` arguments for compilation in `gpflow.optimizers.Scipy`.
(2064)
* Default lower bound for parameters of scalar likelihoods can now be set via configuration.
(1985, 2066)

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

* Fixed some notebook typos and a link. (2052, 2057)
* Fixed missing docs for `SquaredExponential` and `Constant` kernels. (2056, 2063)

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from:

sc336, partev, khurram-ghani, uri-granta, awav, jesnie

A small fix for a bug in the scipy optimize wrapper.

Breaking Changes

* None

Known Caveats

* None

Major Features and Improvements

* None

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

* Patched `gpflow.optimizers.Scipy` to always assign the last good state returned by `scipy.optimize.minimize` to the model under optimization. Previously, this step could be missed if `minimize` failed in some situations, leaving the model in an arbitrary state.

Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from:
khurram-ghani


**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/GPflow/GPflow/compare/v2.6.4...v2.6.5

The main theme of this release is documentation, with a new suite of tutorials, several upgrades to notebooks and the removal of a rather annoying bug in the documentation site.

Perhaps more notably, `check_shapes` has been removed, and can now be found [here](https://github.com/GPflow/check_shapes). This change is breaking for those who are still getting `check_shapes` from `gpflow`, although being in experimental this change does not require a new version number.

Breaking Changes

* `gpflow.experimental.check_shapes` has been removed, in favour of an independent release. Use
`pip install check_shapes` and `import check_shapes` instead.

Major Features and Improvements

* Major rework of documentation landing page and "getting started" section.

Bug Fixes and Other Changes

* Fixed bug related to `tf.saved_model` and methods wrapped in `check_shapes`.
* Documented monitoring with `Adam` optimizer.
* Fixed bug related to switching versions in documentation site
* Fixed several issues relating to mypy


Thanks to our Contributors

This release contains contributions from:

sc336, st--, sethaxen, jesnie