If you install nupic from binary (pip install nupic), that means you get the latest stable version of NuPIC, which could be days or weeks old. If you want to run unit tests from the source code, make sure that you have checked out proper commit SHA in git to sync the tests with the stable version of NuPIC.
For example, if you installed nupic 0.5.7, you should run this command in your git repo before running unit tests:
git fetch upstream
Where upstream is a remote that points to https://github.com/numenta/nupic. This will fetch any tags for releases from the remote.
git checkout tags/0.5.7
This will set your local code to match the release code. Beware this could alter any changes you’ve made to your local filesystem.
Now you can run tests.