Pandas' current behavior on whether indexing returns a view or copy is confusing, even for experienced users. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can make this aspect of pandas easier to grasp by simplifying the copy/view rules, and at the same time make pandas more memory-efficient. And get rid of the SettingWithCopyWarning.
Short summary: the upcoming 0.7.0 release of GeoPandas will start using pyproj.CRS to represent the Coordinate Reference System of a GeoDataFrame. This brings along a better user interface, many changes and improvements from PROJ 6, but might also require some changes in your code (getting rid of proj4 strings).
This blogpost gives some background and motivation for my proposal on better
missing value support in pandas, and the changes that have been merged in the
development version (to be released in pandas 1.0): a new pd.NA scalar is
introduced that can be used consistently across all data types..
Short summary: the upcoming 0.6.0 release of GeoPandas will feature a refactor based on the pandas ExtensionArray interface. Although this change should keep the user interface mostly stable, it enables more robust integration with pandas and allows for more upcoming changes in the future. And given the invasive code changes under the hood, testing is very welcome!
Short summary: the ColumnTransformer, which allows to apply different transformers to different features, has landed in scikit-learn (the PR has been merged in master and this will be included in the upcoming release 0.20).
Last weekend, Marc Garcia and many others organised a world-wide pandas documentation sprint (https://python-sprints.github.io/pandas/). The goal was to improve the pandas API documentation, and I have to say, it was a great success!
Short summary: an improved categorical encoder has landed in scikit-learn (the PR has been merged in master and this will be included in the next release).
In this blogpost I explain the latest developments in the GeoPandas package. Work is ongoing to vastly improve the performance of the package, by leveraging cython to directly interact with the GEOS library.