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December 2022 update

over 1 year ago by Zac Yang

🎉 Happy New Year! Best wishes from the Exabel team for a happy, healthy and prosperous 2023. To round off a fabulous year, we shipped 3 major features in December - alerts, the data catalog and charts on dashboards - and have lots more in store for 2023.

New features

Alerts

Alerts

Alerts allow you to monitor your signals regularly for anomalies and inflection points, helping you to stay on top of the large and ever-growing volumes of alternative data. See the launch announcement and user guide for details.

Data Catalog

Data Catalog

Our new data catalog allows you to search and browse data sets that are already pre-integrated on the Exabel platform. This is accessible from the Exabel app, or from Data → Data catalog in the app menu. You may search by ticker, data category, vendor, or coverage sectors & geographies. Each data set listing will also include information about the data, its coverage, history and delivery frequencies.

Charts on Dashboards

By popular demand, dashboards can now incorporate charts that have been saved to your Library from Signal Explorer. This extends upon the revamped charts we released in October, allowing these charts to now be displayed together in a dashboard.

To add a chart widget, open a dashboard (you must have write access), click "Configure" to edit the dashboard, and then "Add chart" to select a chart from your Library. Then, choose from one of the layout options.

📘

Current chart limitations

  • Charts are added to the dashboard as a copy - subsequent edits to the same chart in Signal Explorer will not be reflected in the dashboard (we are working to allow adding a chart by reference)
  • Charts cannot be edited from the dashboard - you will have to remove the widget and add it again if you have made edits (we are working to allow editing from the dashboard)
  • Charts do not work very well on smaller screens (we are working to improve this)

Other new features

  • Tag API: new TagService in the Analytics API for creating and managing tags. Like the other services in the Analytics API, requests to the TagService are executed in the context of the customer's service account, which is a special user that is part of the customer user group. Hence, only tags that are in folders shared to this service account, via the customer user group, will be accessible via the TagService.
  • Prediction models: Added a new "Impute" option for input signals, which if checked will impute missing values. This is helpful in cases where some input signals have missing data - before, we dropped data points where any of the input signals has missing values. With the new feature, if imputation is selected for those signals, we now impute a value of 0. Note that since the model pipeline normalizes all input signals to have a median of 0, this is equivalent to filling missing values with the median of the input.

Improvements

  • Company search: Improved speed and ranking of search results, and also now return private companies (from the FactSet universe) that have time series data.
  • Drill-downs: Added support to specify companies / entities, in addition to tags, it is applicable for.
  • Drill-downs / financial models: Improved search for entities to be viewed.
  • DSL: Deprecate model_by_id() and backtests() in favor of the new functions model_predictions() and model_backtests() which function the same way. (See the deprecation announcement here.)
  • DSL: When using tag(), return time series labels with entity display names, instead of less-readable entity resource names.
  • DSL: In forecast(), better handle time series where frequency cannot be determined.
  • DSL: fx() will no longer forward-fill the last value into the future, which was causing misleading plots of FX rates.
  • Data API: ListRelationships now supports not providing neither of fromEntity and toEntity. In this case, it is expected that this call will take some time to complete.

Security

  • Login: Changed to use a new authorization code flow and the universal login form hosted by Auth0 on auth.exabel.com. Login sessions are valid until 24 hours of inactivity.

Bug fixes

  • Drill-downs: Fix incorrect delay transformation in charts configured to show the "previous year" as a separate line.
  • Dashboards: Fix layout issue with the 3-column-with-hero layout.
  • Pagination: Fix issue where typing a page number would immediately lead to a page change before the user finishes typing.
  • DSL: Fixed a bug where the ffill and bfill upsampling operations of the resample() function would not fill in missing data points when evaluating for multiple entities with data on different dates.