RFC: Draft for the new release note v0.18

I put together a release note, please feel free to comment on it (or edit).

---

Dear community!

We are very pleased to announce the new 0.18 release of MNE-Python (http://martinos.org/mne/stable/).

A few highlights

• Python 2 is no longer supported; MNE-Python now requires Python 3.5+
• New tutorials and examples on sleep stage classification, data simulation using subject’s anatomy, how to use EEG montages on fsaverage
• New module to simulate SourceEstimates
• Improved performance using CUDA, better copy management, better dispatching of the computation over the channels
• New fetchers for polysomnography (PSG) recordings from Physionet and fsaverage template
• Better support for source reconstruction with beamformers and other inverse models
• Improved UI and visualizations for topomaps, Raw and Epochs objects
• Better support for Annotations
• Support to compute power envelope correlations on brain parcellation for rest data
• Better rendering of the coregistration
• Added partial support for PyVista as a 3D backend that can replace mayavi
• Added support for Raw, Epochs and Evoked noise simulation
• Added new parcellation (448-labels subdivided aparc) and improve support including morphing of the labels
• Better support for the TFR objects

And we caught and fixed more than 50 bugs!

Notable API changes

• Deprecation of mne.realtime module to become entire project in the MNE echosystem
• Deprecation of mne.io.find_edf_events, raw.estimate_rank
• Reading BDF and GDF files with mne.io.read_raw_edf is deprecated and replaced by mne.io.read_raw_bdf and mne.io.read_raw_gdf
• The signatures of mne.preprocessing.ICA, mne.simulation.add_noise and mne.simulation.add_chpi have changed
• Added overwrite parameter in mne.Epochs.save
• mne.minimum_norm.apply_inverse now returns mne.VolVectorSourceEstimate when needed
• Annotations are now kept sorted by onset
• peak_finder should be imported as: from mne.preprocessing import peak_finder

For a full list of improvements and API changes see: http://martinos.org/mne/stable/whats_new.html#version-0-18

To install the latest release the following command should do the job:

$ pip install --upgrade mne

As usual, we welcome your bug reports, feature requests, critiques, and contributions.

Some links:

• https://github.com/mne-tools/mne-python (code + readme on how to install)
• http://martinos.org/mne/stable/ (full MNE documentation)

Follow us on Twitter for general news (https://twitter.com/mne_news) and for a regular feed of merged PRs (https://twitter.com/mne_python).

Regards, The MNE-Python developers

52 people made commits that contributed to this release (in alphabetical order):

• Achilleas Koutsou
• Alexander Kovrig
• Alexandre Gramfort
• Antoine Gauthier
• Britta Westner
• Bruno Nicenboim
• Burkhard Maess
• Chris Bailey
• Chris Holdgraf
• Christian Brodbeck
• Clemens Brunner
• Cristóbal Moënne-Loccoz
• Daniel McCloy
• David Haslacher
• Denis A. Engemann
• Dirk Gütlin
• Eric Larson
• Evgenii Kalenkovich
• Fede Raimondo
• Guillaume Favelier
• Hubert Banville
• Ivana Kojcic
• Jean-Remi King
• Jeff Hanna
• Joan Massich
• Johannes Kasper
• Jon Houck
• Jona Sassenhagen
• José C. García Alanis
• Jussi Nurminen
• Katarina Slama
• Keith Doelling
• Kostiantyn Maksymenko
• Larry Eisenman
• Legrand Nicolas
• Mainak Jas
• Marijn van Vliet
• Mikolaj Magnuski
• Nathalie Gayraud
• Nikolas Chalas
• Oleh Kozynets
• Quentin Bertrand
• Samuel Deslauriers-Gauthier
• Sebastián Castaño
• Simon Kern
• Stanislas Chambon
• Stefan Appelhoff
• Stefan Repplinger
• Steve Matindi
• Teon Brooks
• Thomas Donoghue
• Thomas Hartmann

[britta-wstnr]

Something like: Better support for source reconstruction with beamformers // the beamformer module and other inverse models ? – beamformers are inverse models, too, that does not get quite clear to me as it is now.

[sappelhoff]

We could add the second twitter channel:

Follow us on Twitter for general news: https://twitter.com/mne_news
... and for for a regular overview of merged PRs: https://twitter.com/mne_python