Hello,

We are proud to announce v0.16.1 of pandas, a minor release from 0.16.0.

This release includes a small number of API changes, several new features, enhancements, and performance improvements along with a large number of bug fixes.

This was a release of 7 weeks with 222 commits by 57 authors encompassing 85 issues.

We recommend that all users upgrade to this version.

*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 this release include:

- Support for *CategoricalIndex*, a category based index, see here http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0161-enhancements-categoricalindex - New section on how-to-contribute to *pandas*, see here http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/contributing.html - Revised "Merge, join, and concatenate" documentation, including graphical examples to make it easier to understand each operations, see here http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/merging.html - New method *sample* for drawing random samples from Series, DataFrames and Panels. See here http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0161-enhancements-sample - The default *Index* printing has changed to a more uniform format, see here http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0161-index-repr - *BusinessHour* datetime-offset is now supported, see here http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/timeseries.html#business-hour - Further enhancement to the *.str* accessor to make string operations easier, see here http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0161-enhancements-string

See the Whatsnew in v0.16.1 http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/whatsnew.html#v0-16-1-may-11-2015

Documentation: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/

Source tarballs, windows binaries are available on PyPI: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pandas

windows binaries are courtesy of Christoph Gohlke and are built on Numpy 1.8 macosx wheels are courtesy of Matthew Brett

Please report any issues here: https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues

Thanks

The Pandas Development Team

Contributors to the 0.16.1 release

- - Alfonso MHC - Andy Hayden - Artemy Kolchinsky - Chris Gilmer - Chris Grinolds - Dan Birken - David BROCHART - David Hirschfeld - David Stephens - Dr. Leo - Evan Wright - Frans van Dunné - Hatem Nassrat - Henning Sperr - Hugo Herter - Jan Schulz - Jeff Blackburne - Jeff Reback - Jim Crist - Jonas Abernot - Joris Van den Bossche - Kerby Shedden - Leo Razoumov - Manuel Riel - Mortada Mehyar - Nick Burns - Nick Eubank - Olivier Grisel - Phillip Cloud - Pietro Battiston - Roy Hyunjin Han - Sam Zhang - Scott Sanderson - Stephan Hoyer - Tiago Antao - Tom Ajamian - Tom Augspurger - Tomaz Berisa - Vikram Shirgur - Vladimir Filimonov - William Hogman - Yasin A - Younggun Kim - behzad nouri - dsm054 - floydsoft - flying-sheep - gfr - jnmclarty - jreback - ksanghai - lucas - mschmohl - ptype - rockg - scls19fr - sinhrks