ANN: pandas 0.16.1 released

[Jeff Reback]

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