Looking for matching names among two text files
The first thing that really jumped out at me is your loadFile method is using synchronous http requests (looks accidental as you're using a callback anyway, see msdn for why this should be avoided etc).

Instead of client.open('GET', filename); you probably want client.open('GET', filename, true);

Making async requests will allow the first notable improvement I would make is to make init loading async. I'm going to use the native promises -- feel free to adapt

// setup
function init() {
  var base = "data/sample2/",
    namesFile = base + "names.txt",
    dataFile = base + "data.txt";

  Promise.all([loadFile(namesFile), loadFile(dataFile)])
  .then(function(values) {
    var names = values[0];
    processData(values[1]);
  });
}

// ajax loading
function loadFile(filename) {
  return new Promise(function(resolve, error) {
    var client = new XMLHttpRequest();
    client.open('GET', filename, true);
    client.onreadystatechange = function() {
      if (client.readyState == 4 &amp;&amp; client.status == 200) {
        var result = client.responseText.split("\n");
        // custom handling for the data set..
        if (result[0].search(',') !== -1) {
          result = arrCSVtoObj(result);
        }
        resolve(result);
      }
    };
    client.send();
  });
}