esowc/ecPoint-Calibrate: v0.11.0

This release primarily addresses #112 and #116 by providing the user with an option to choose a format for PDT that's highly optimized and more likely to fit in the memory than ASCII files. This has been achieved using a combination of Parquet data format, lazy evaluation, and Categorical Types.

The release also includes fixes for some bug in Milestone 1.

• Date fields in PDT are formatted as YYYY-MM-DD (previously YYYYMMDD), to prevent automatic type-cast to int64. (5c1580e)
• Implement a high-performance loader based on Apache Parquet. (fcc7ee8)
• Allow selecting between ASCII and Parquet containers for storing PDT, on the GUI. (91193c1)
• Support reading from Parquet files in postprocessing. The container type will be automatically inferred. (c8c519c)
• Improve memory utilization of PDT preloader during postprocessing, using lazy evaluation. (1d569b9)
• Fix metadata in PDT for Forecast Error (#93, 06c8ae7)
• Add loader in postprocessing workflow for expensive actions. (edfa101)
• Make FE(R) CSV dumps more legible. (#96, d9d8af4)

• Allow negative addition factor in computations. (#83, 0cad6b8) #### Technical improvements

• Significantly reduce Docker build context for the core service.

• Implement an interface for PDT loaders. (3cfccf9)
• Allow selecting specific columns from a PDT, without loading the whole file in memory. (3cfccf9)
• Implement iterator protocol for point data table loaders. This will allow us to perform lazy operations on PDT in future. (a0179fa)
• Cache dataframe and column properties in PDT loaders.
• Other typing improvements to loader classes.

Note: PDT = Point Data Table