catboost/catboost v1.2.9 on GitHub

⚠️ There are no JVM artifacts for this release due to issues with publishing.: They will be updated in the next release soon.

Major changes

[Python-package] Add polars input data support. #2524.
Polars data structures are supported for features, labels and auxiliary data like weight, timestamp etc.

[R-package] Make 'predict' an S3 method #1657. Thanks to @david-cortes.
Add RMSPE metric and loss (both as are CPU-only for now) #1767. Thanks to @ivan339339.
[C/C++ applier] New function LoadFullModelZeroCopy for mmap #2893. Thanks to @gakoshin.

Optimize Lossguide grow policy on CPU #2883. Approximate speedup is 1.4x. Thanks to @Levachev.
[Python-package] Support non-float32 numpy numeric types in multithreaded native features data initialization. #1558, #2847
[Python-package] Avoid possible repeated reparsing of estimator parameters to canonical forms

Support Python 3.14 #2943
pyproject.toml is now PEP-517 compliant.
Estimators: Add __sklearn_tags__ method to be compatible with scikit-learn >= 1.8.x. #2955
Estimators: Add __repr__ method with a meaningful description expected by scikit-learn #2307. Thanks to @besteady.
Adapt to the removal of dry_run parameters in setuptools 81.0. pypa/setuptools#4872
Set upper version bounds for important dependencies to avoid breaking changes

[Windows] Support building with MSVC toolsets 14.4*. #2302
[GPU] Switch from hardcoded gencode specifications in multiple CMakeLists.txt files to the standard CMake variable CMAKE_CUDA_ARCHITECTURES, although the default value is non-standard and specified in cuda.cmake. #2540
[macOS] Support Apple Clang 17. #2860
[Python-package][Windows] Fix python package installation from a source distribution. #3024
[Python-package] wheel build dependency no longer required

[Performance][Windows] __SSE__ compiler flag was not enabled for Windows builds with MSVC compiler. This affected code that relied on this flag including some operations used during training and quantization during model inference. It is important to note that the compiler itself was configured for SSE support and could still apply automatic SSE optimizations.
[Python-package] carry.py: fix _uplift_by_name. #2861
[Python-package] CatBoostError was missing from __all__ in catboost package. #2862
[Python-package] log_cout was used instead of log_cerr by mistake. #2863
[Python-package] Don't fail when all features are embeddings with the same dimension. #2875
[Python-package] get_params: deep parameter meaning was inconsistent with scikit-learn expectations. #2991
[Python-package] Estimators' _get_tags: Add missing tags. #3008
[Python-package] Estimators' _get_tags returned incorrect values for several tags. #3009
[Python-package] Incorrect values were silently accepted in timestamp parameters. #3019
[CLI] fix eval result output for MultiRMSE
[GPU] Fix devices parameter parsing. Parsing was non-robust: in case of non-numbers specified it defaulted to 0 and device ids outside of the available range were silently ignored.
[C/C++ applier] Fix a race condition in error messages reported by GetErrorString in multithreaded programs. It is now thread-local.