Release 0.9.0

This release contains a major overhaul of Anonlink’s API and introduces support for multi-party linkage.

The changes are all additive, so the previous API continues to work. That API has now been deprecated and will be removed in a future release. The deprecation timeline is:

• v0.9.0: old API deprecated
• v0.10.0: use of old API raises a warning
• v0.11.0: remove old API

Major changes

• Introduce abstract similarity functions. The Sørensen–Dice coefficient is now just one possible similarity function.
  • Implement Hamming similarity as a similarity function.
  • Permit linkage of records other than CLKs (BYO similarity function).
  • Similarity functions now return multiple contiguous arrays instead of a list of tuples.
  • Candidate pairs from similarity functions are now always sorted.
• Introduce a standard type for storing candidate pairs. This is now used consistently throughout the API.
• Provide a function for multiparty candidate generation. It takes multiple datasets and compares them against each other using a similarity function.
• Extend the greedy solver to multiparty problems.
  • The greedy solver also takes the new candidate pairs type.
• Implement serialisation and deserialisation of candidate pairs.
  • Multiple files with serialised candidate pairs can be merged without loading everything into memory at once.
• Introduce type annotations in the new API.

Minor changes

• Automatically test on Python 3.7.
• Remove support for Python 3.5 and below.
• Update Clkhash dependency to 0.11.
• Minor documentation and style in anonlink.concurrency.
• Provide a convenience function for generating valid candidate pairs from a chunk.
• Change the format of a chunk and move the type definition to anonlink.typechecking.

See the changelog for details.