pandas dataframes

[chrhck]

Dataframes are awesome. Do we want to support them?
This would mean either switching over from numpy recarrays completely or adding an abstraction layer that can handle both..

[HansN87]

Dataframes are awesome! I am in favor of supporting them. Completely switching probably requires some performance comparisons (found this: http://gouthamanbalaraman.com/blog/numpy-vs-pandas-comparison.html).

[martwo]

SkyLLH doesn't use numpy recarray internally. it's all 1d ndarrays. I would be surprised if Dataframes would be faster than that

[chrhck]

From the link @HansN87 posted above it seems Dataframes are always quicker for more than 500k rows, and potentially quicker for more than 50k rows, although having a larger memory footprint.
For now I think a good starting point would be to add support for Dataframes in the usercode (e.g. when dealing with analyzing trials).