New developments in the data.table package (Arun Srinivasan)

Arun Srinivasan (the co-developer of the popular data.table package) is visiting us in Amsterdam. Talk abstract: The data.table package in R provides fast, flexible and memory efficient methods for data wrangling. As of Dec 30 2016, data.table is the 3rd largest SO tag about an R package (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/data.table) (4900+ Q), 8th most starred R package on Github (http://www.r-pkg.org/starred), has >300 CRAN (http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/%7Erowlings/R/TaskViews/) + BioConductor (http://www.bioconductor.org/) packages using it, and is the #1 most directly downloaded R package (https://www.rdocumentation.org/trends) based on RStudio's CRAN mirror. A major update was recently pushed to CRAN, `v1.10.0`, and consists of >75 bug fixes and >40 features, including parallel file writer, parallel subsets, non-equi joins etc. In this talk, we will first go through data.table's syntax and its philosophy, followed by a summary of some of the interesting new features in this release.