The conda environment uses very outdated versions of several packages, most notably XGBoost, Uproot and Awkward Arrays. There have been substantial improvements and interface changes in many of these packages and we could benefit from making our code compatible with them. Since we now have the BDTs in JSON format, we are no longer tied to XGBoost 0.90 and can do the upgrade.
This is more work than I thought and also less performance increase than I thought. I'll put this back on the shelf for now while we have more urgent things to do.
The conda environment uses very outdated versions of several packages, most notably XGBoost, Uproot and Awkward Arrays. There have been substantial improvements and interface changes in many of these packages and we could benefit from making our code compatible with them. Since we now have the BDTs in JSON format, we are no longer tied to XGBoost 0.90 and can do the upgrade.