MLFlow - v1.27.0

MLflow 1.27.0 includes several major features and improvements:

• [Pipelines] With MLflow 1.27.0, we are excited to announce the release of MLflow Pipelines, an opinionated framework for structuring MLOps workflows that simplifies and standardizes machine learning application development and productionization. MLflow Pipelines makes it easy for data scientists to follow best practices for creating production-ready ML deliverables, allowing them to focus on developing excellent models. MLflow Pipelines also enables ML engineers and DevOps teams to seamlessly deploy models to production and incorporate them into applications. To get started with MLflow Pipelines, check out the docs at https://mlflow.org/docs/latest/pipelines.html. (#6115)

• [UI] Introduce UI support for searching and comparing runs across multiple Experiments (#5971, @r3stl355)

More features:

• [Tracking] When using batch logging APIs, automatically split large sets of metrics, tags, and params into multiple requests (#6052, @nzw0301)
• [Tracking] When an Experiment is deleted, SQL-based backends also move the associate Runs to the "deleted" lifecycle stage (#6064, @AdityaIyengar27)
• [Tracking] Add support for logging single-element ndarray and tensor instances as metrics via the mlflow.log_metric() API (#5756, @ntakouris)
• [Models] Add support for CatBoostRanker models to the mlflow.catboost flavor (#6032, @danielgafni)
• [Models] Integrate SHAP's KernelExplainer with mlflow.evaluate(), enabling model explanations on categorical data (#6044, #5920, @WeichenXu123)
• [Models] Extend mlflow.evaluate() to automatically log the score() outputs of scikit-learn models as metrics (#5935, #5903, @WeichenXu123)

Bug fixes and documentation updates:

• [UI] Fix broken model links in the Runs table on the MLflow Experiment Page (#6014, @hctpbl)
• [Tracking/Installation] Require sqlalchemy>=1.4.0 upon MLflow installation, which is necessary for usage of SQL-based MLflow Tracking backends (#6024, @sniafas)
• [Tracking] Fix a regression that caused mlflow server to reject LogParam API requests containing empty string values (#6031, @harupy)
• [Tracking] Fix a failure in scikit-learn autologging that occurred when matplotlib was not installed on the host system (#5995, @fa9r)
• [Tracking] Fix a failure in TensorFlow autologging that occurred when training models on tf.data.Dataset inputs (#6061, @dbczumar)
• [Artifacts] Address artifact download failures from SFTP locations that occurred due to mismanaged concurrency (#5840, @rsundqvist)
• [Models] Fix a bug where MLflow Models did not restore bundled code properly if multiple models use the same code module name (#5926, @BFAnas)
• [Models] Address an issue where mlflow.sklearn.model() did not properly restore bundled model code (#6037, @WeichenXu123)
• [Models] Fix a bug in mlflow.evaluate() that caused input data objects to be mutated when evaluating certain scikit-learn models (#6141, @dbczumar)
• [Models] Fix a failure in mlflow.pyfunc.spark_udf that occurred when the UDF was invoked on an empty RDD partition (#6063, @WeichenXu123)
• [Models] Fix a failure in mlflow models build-docker that occurred when env-manager=local was specified (#6046, @bneijt)
• [Projects] Improve robustness of the git repository check that occurs prior to MLflow Project execution (#6000, @dkapur17)
• [Projects] Address a failure that arose when running a Project that does not have a master branch (#5889, @harupy)
• [Docs] Correct several typos throughout the MLflow docs (#5959, @ryanrussell)

Small bug fixes and doc updates (#6041, @drsantos89; #6138, #6137, #6132, @sunishsheth2009; #6144, #6124, #6125, #6123, #6057, #6060, #6050, #6038, #6029, #6030, #6025, #6018, #6019, #5962, #5974, #5972, #5957, #5947, #5907, #5938, #5906, #5932, #5919, #5914, #5888, #5890, #5886, #5873, #5865, #5843, @harupy; #6113, @comojin1994; #5930, @yashaswikakumanu; #5837, @shrinath-suresh; #6067, @deepyaman; #5997, @idlefella; #6021, @BenWilson2; #5984, @Sumanth077; #5929, @krunal16-c; #5879, @kugland; #5875, @ognis1205; #6006, @ryanrussell; #6140, @jinzhang21; #5983, @elk15; #6022, @apurva-koti; #5982, @EB-Joel; #5981, #5980, @punitkashyup; #6103, @ikrizanic; #5988, #5969, @SaumyaBhushan; #6020, #5991, @WeichenXu123; #5910, #5912, @Dark-Knight11; #6005, @Asinsa; #6023, @subramaniam02; #5999, @Regis-Caelum; #6007, @CaioCavalcanti; #5943, @kvaithin; #6017, #6002, @NeoKish; #6111, @T1b4lt; #5986, @seyyidibrahimgulec; #6053, @Zohair-coder; #6146, #6145, #6143, #6139, #6134, #6136, #6135, #6133, #6071, #6070, @dbczumar; #6026, @rotate2050)