Pandas 0.18 deprecated passing "null-ish" values to pd.categorical. The
expectation, instead, is that you use categorical's native support for
missing data, which means the user will always get NaN's for missing
entries of the categorical.
A follow-up to this change should probably drop support for custom
missing values entirely and to use LabelArray/categorical for integer
data.
- Adds a new class, ``LabelArray``, which is a subclass of np.ndarray.
LabelArray is conceptually similar to pandas.Categorical, in that it
stores data with many duplicate values as indices into an array of
unique values. For string data with many duplicates (e.g. time-series
of tickers or or industry classifications), this provides multiple
orders of magnitude of improvement when doing string operations,
especially string comparison/matching operations.
- Adds a new generic object "specialization" for `AdjustedArrayWindow`,
and a corresponding ObjectOverwrite adjustment.
- Adds a new ``postprocess`` method to ``zipline.pipeline.term.Term``.
This method is called on the final result of any pipeline expression
after screen filtering has occurred. The default implementation of
``postprocess`` is identity, but Classifier overrides it to coerce
string columns into pandas.Categoricals before presenting them to the
user.
Scott Sanderson