NEWS

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shaman 2.1.0 (2026-10-16)

• shaman_shuffle_hic_track() is about 6x faster; results are unchanged for the same seed.
• The sort_uniq step of the shuffle (used by shaman_shuffle_hic_track()) counts contacts in memory instead of with sort | uniq -c: 44 to 3.5 min on chr1 of a Hi-C dataset.
• Scoring no longer needs perl or temporary files and is about 2x faster on dense regions; scores are unchanged.
• Scoring needs less memory (peak virtual memory 16-36GB instead of 48-77GB with shaman 2.0 for dense 5Mb matrices) and can use several threads with options(shaman.score.threads = N); scores are unchanged.
• shaman_score_hic_mat_for_track() accepts vectors of matrices; matrices in the same row share one read of each track.
• shaman_shuffle_hic_track(), shaman_shuffle_hic_mat_for_track() and shaman_shuffle_and_score_hic_mat() take a seed argument for reproducible shuffles. shaman_shuffle_hic_track() stores each chromosome's seed, time-based ones included, in the track attribute seed; shaman_shuffle_hic_mat_for_track() returns the seed it used (NA when it did not shuffle) instead of 0 or 1, and no longer fails with "object 'ret' not found" when sort_uniq = FALSE and the matrix is not shuffled; shaman_shuffle_and_score_hic_mat() returns the seed as seed.
• SGE mode (options(shaman.sge_support = 1)) works again with current misha.
• shaman_shuffle_hic_track() no longer fails after importing the track because the shaman.debug option was missing.
• The shuffler no longer writes one value past the end of a buffer when smoothing the decay curve; results are unchanged.
• The shuffler no longer kills the R session (division by zero) on fewer than 10,000 contacts: a small chromosome or contig in shaman_shuffle_hic_track(), or a sparse region in shaman_shuffle_and_score_hic_mat().
• The shuffler stops with an error when it cannot write its output (e.g. a full disk) instead of leaving a truncated file.
• shaman_score_hic_track() stops with an error naming the matrices that still have no score after 3 rounds, instead of resubmitting them forever; the finished scores stay in work_dir, so a rerun computes only the missing ones.
• A matrix whose expected has fewer contacts than k_exp gets no scores (as with fewer than k) instead of failing with "Cannot find more nearest neighbours than there are points".
• library(shaman) no longer tries to unpack the example database.
• The unused shaman.ks_pl option was removed from shaman.conf; configuration files that still set it load as before.
• shaman now requires R >= 4.0.0 and a C++17 compiler.
• shaman_get_test_track_db() returns a small example database (chr2:176.5e06-177e06 of the previous one), built in the session's temporary directory; shaman_get_test_track_db(full = TRUE) returns the full one, downloaded from the lab's public S3 bucket into the user cache on first use (its md5 is checked), in a form current misha can open. The package no longer includes the 104MB database, and the examples run on the small one.
• Gviz is suggested instead of required; shaman_plot_tracks_and_annotations() and shaman_plot_map_score_with_annotations() need it.
• The shuffle, score and feature grid functions restore the misha options they set (gmultitasking, gmax.data.size), and shaman_plot_feature_grid() restores par().
• The shuffler writes its progress through R's console instead of directly to stderr.
• Multi-core mode (options(shaman.mc_support = 1)) uses parallel::mclapply() and no longer registers doMC as the foreach backend (doMC is no longer a dependency). Code of your own that ran %dopar% on the backend shaman had registered now runs sequentially, with foreach's warning; register a backend yourself.
• The random 1-10s wait before each chromosome's shuffle now happens only in SGE jobs, not in multi-core mode or in direct calls of shaman_shuffle_hic_mat_for_track().
• In multi-core and SGE mode, shaman_shuffle_hic_track() stops before importing the track when a chromosome's shuffle fails (an error, or its process killed, e.g. for memory), and keeps the shuffled chromosomes in work_dir so that a rerun shuffles only the rest. Before, it imported the track without the failed chromosomes (in multi-core mode also without the others scheduled in the same process) and deleted the work.
• The usage article runs on the full example database, and its figures are made by the code it shows (precomputed, so the vignette builds without it).
• The map plots use linewidth instead of size for their axis lines, so ggplot2 no longer warns that size is deprecated; shaman now requires ggplot2 >= 3.4.0.