Previously, all specs had to be pre-allocated by using the 'add_history'
function. This is now no longer required and instead serves as a hint to
the HistoryContainer to pre-allocate the space for the given spec.
History can grow by increasing the length for a frequency, adding a
frequency, or adding a field. It can grow with any combination of
these.
HistoryContainer now is aware of the data_frequency of the algorithm,
and no longer uses the daily_at_midnight flag; instead, this is the
default behavior.
Fixes an issue that caused a crash if a user assigned a new column into a
returned history DataFrame. This occurred because we re-use DataFrames between
history() calls, so the new column caused an index-size mismatch on the next
attempted calculation.
Ideally we would fix this by in-place dropping the columns, but that isn't
supported in pandas 0.12.0, so instead we just return a complete copy of the
frame. We should re-evaluate this implementation when we're on a more modern
pandas version.
Overhauls `HistoryContainer` in prep for support of more than one frequency.
Major changes:
- Methods/variables referring to "day" have been renamed/generalized.
- `current_day_panel` became `buffer_panel`, which is now a `RollingPanel`
- `prior_day_panel` became a dictionary mapping `Frequency` objects to
"digest panels", which are instances of `RollingPanel`.
- Hard-coded daily rollover replaced with a notion of a "current window" for
each unique frequency managed by the panel.
- When the end of the current window is reached for a given frequency, we
compute an aggregate bar (code refers to this as a "digest"), which is
appended to a panel associated with that frequency.
- Window rollover dates are managed by a pair of dictionaries,
`cur_window_starts` and `cur_window_closes`. The `Frequency` class is
responsible for computing window bounds based on the open/close of the
previous window.
- Semantic change to the `open_price` field: `open_price` now always
contains the price of the first trade occurring in the given window.
Previously it contained the price of the first minute in the window,
returning NaN it the security happened not to trade in the first minute.
Joe Jevnik