ANN: pandas v0.19.0 released

[Joris Van den Bossche]

Hi all,

I'm happy to announce pandas 0.19.0 has been released.
This is a major release from 0.18.1 and includes a number of API changes, several new features, enhancements, and performance improvements along with a large number of bug fixes. See the Whatsnew file for more information. We recommend that all users upgrade to this version.

This is the work of 5 months of development by 117 contributors. A big thank you to all contributors!

Joris

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What is it:

pandas is a Python package providing fast, flexible, and expressive data structures designed to make working with “relational” or “labeled” data both easy and intuitive. It aims to be the fundamental high-level building block for doing practical, real world data analysis in Python. Additionally, it has the broader goal of becoming the most powerful and flexible open source data analysis / manipulation tool available in any language.

Highlights of the 0.19.0 release include:

• New method merge_asof for asof-style time-series joining, see here
• The .rolling() method is now time-series aware, see here
• read_csv now supports parsing Categorical data, see here
• A function union_categorical has been added for combining categoricals, see here
• PeriodIndex now has its own period dtype, and changed to be more consistent with other Index classes. See here
• Sparse data structures gained enhanced support of int and bool dtypes, see here
• Comparison operations with Series no longer ignores the index, see here for an overview of the API changes.
• Introduction of a pandas development API for utility functions, see here.
• Deprecation of Panel4D and PanelND. We recommend to represent these types of n-dimensional data with the xarray package.
• Removal of the previously deprecated modules pandas.io.data, pandas.io.wb, pandas.tools.rplot.

See the Whatsnew file for more information.

How to get it:

Source tarballs and windows/mac/linux wheels are available on PyPI (thanks to Christoph Gohlke for the windows wheels, and to Matthew Brett for setting up the mac/linux wheels).
Conda packages are already available via the conda-forge channel (conda install pandas -c conda-forge). It will be available on the main channel shortly.

Issues:

Please report any issues on our issue tracker: https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues

Thanks to all the contributors:

• adneu
• Adrien Emery
• agraboso
• Alex Alekseyev
• Alex Vig
• Allen Riddell
• Amol
• Amol Agrawal
• Andy R. Terrel
• Anthonios Partheniou
• babakkeyvani
• Ben Kandel
• Bob Baxley
• Brett Rosen
• c123w
• Camilo Cota
• Chris
• chris-b1
• Chris Grinolds
• Christian Hudon
• Christopher C. Aycock
• Chris Warth
• cmazzullo
• conquistador1492
• cr3
• Daniel Siladji
• Douglas McNeil
• Drewrey Lupton
• dsm054
• Eduardo Blancas Reyes
• Elliot Marsden
• Evan Wright
• Felix Marczinowski
• Francis T. O’Donovan
• Gábor Lipták
• Geraint Duck
• gfyoung
• Giacomo Ferroni
• Grant Roch
• Haleemur Ali
• harshul1610
• Hassan Shamim
• iamsimha
• Iulius Curt
• Ivan Nazarov
• jackieleng
• Jeff Reback
• Jeffrey Gerard
• Jenn Olsen
• Jim Crist
• Joe Jevnik
• John Evans
• John Freeman
• John Liekezer
• Johnny Gill
• John W. O’Brien
• John Zwinck
• Jordan Erenrich
• Joris Van den Bossche
• Josh Howes
• Jozef Brandys
• Kamil Sindi
• Ka Wo Chen
• Kerby Shedden
• Kernc
• Kevin Sheppard
• Matthieu Brucher
• Maximilian Roos
• Michael Scherer
• Mike Graham
• Mortada Mehyar
• mpuels
• Muhammad Haseeb Tariq
• Nate George
• Neil Parley
• Nicolas Bonnotte
• OXPHOS
• Pan Deng / Zora
• Paul
• Pauli Virtanen
• Paul Mestemaker
• Pawel Kordek
• Pietro Battiston
• pijucha
• Piotr Jucha
• priyankjain
• Ravi Kumar Nimmi
• Robert Gieseke
• Robert Kern
• Roger Thomas
• Roy Keyes
• Russell Smith
• Sahil Dua
• Sanjiv Lobo
• Sašo Stanovnik
• Shawn Heide
• sinhrks
• Sinhrks
• Stephen Kappel
• Steve Choi
• Stewart Henderson
• Sudarshan Konge
• Thomas A Caswell
• Tom Augspurger
• Tom Bird
• Uwe Hoffmann
• wcwagner
• WillAyd
• Xiang Zhang
• Yadunandan
• Yaroslav Halchenko
• YG-Riku
• Yuichiro Kaneko
• yui-knk
• zhangjinjie
• znmean
• 颜发才（Yan Facai）