- added requirement for minimum pandas version 2.0
- two bugfixes originating from nan as a dictionary key and pandas value_counts()
- due to the possibility of a halt bug from nan datatype drift when uploading a serialized postprocess_dict using a library like pickle, we recomend updating to version 8.33 for all users
- updated the use of pandas to_datetime parsing to format='mixed' in order to silence warning
- as a clarification, if native support for bytes type formatted entries is desired under automation, one possible solution (with latency tradeoff in categoric encodings) is to pass:
assignparam = {'global_assignparam' : {'str_convert':'conditional_on_bytes'}}