# Support Libraries¶

In general, we will try to avoid re-implementing complex mathematical algorithms, and use instead a small set of well-tested, community supported packages. All packages chosen have large developer bases, and a wide community of users, ensuring long-term support.

The following are support libraries that are allowed when developing CTA Pipeline algorithms. Any new dependencies must be discussed with the software manager.

## Math/Stats¶

A large variety of advanced math and statistcs functions can be found in the numpy (data structures and numerics )and scipy packages (advanced mathematics).

Specific functionality:

these functions are all based on numpy.ndarray data structures, which provide c-like speeds.

## Multivariate Analysis and Machine Learning¶

SciKit-Learn, an extension of SciPy, provides very friendly and well-documented interface to a wide variety of MVA techniques, both for classification and regression.

• Decision Trees

• Support vector machines

• Random Forrests

• Perceptrons

• Clustering

• Dimensionality Reduction

• training/cross-checks

• etc.

## Astronomical Calculations¶

AstroPy is the accepted package for all astronomical calculations. Specifically:

subpackages of Astropy that are not marked as “reasonable stable” or “mature” should be avoided until their interfaces are solidified. The list can be found on the astropy documentation page, under the list current status of subpackages

## Tabular Data Processing¶

We support the following systems to process and manipulate tabular data (e.g.

an event list):

• astropy.table: for small table manipulations

• pandas: for more complex manipulations (note it does not support columns that contain array-values, unlike astropy.table, but the two are otherwise cross-convertable)

• pytables: for direct manipulation of tables in HDF5 files (faster than other systems for large on-disk files)

### low-level FITS Table Access¶

FITS Tables can be read via astropy.table, or astropy.io.fits (formerly called pyfits), however these implementations are not intended for efficient access to very large files (As they access all tables column-wise). In the case we want to load GBs or more of data in a FITS table, the fitsio module should be used instead. It is a simple wrapper for libCFITSIO, and supports efficient row-wise table access. It is not yet included in Anaconda’s distribution, so must be installed via pip

pip install --user fitsio


### low-level HDF5 Table Access¶

For HDF5 input/output we support only pytables (which is generally used inside other systems like pandas.

## Model Fitting¶

We support only scipy.optimize, iminuit, and scikit-learn fitting systems.

## Graphics and Plotting¶

We support the following:

• matplotlib (recommended for most cases)

• bokeh (for web-guis)

## Parallelization and Speed-ups¶

Since execution speed is important in some algorithms (particularly those called per-event), the speed of python can be a hindrance to performance. The following methods to improve speed are allowed in ctapipe:

### Use NumPy operations¶

One of the easiest way to speed up code is to attempt to avoid for-loops (which are slow) by using numpy vector and matrix operations instead, as well as libraries that use them internally (like scipy and astropy). This requires no special support, but can sometimes be conceptually difficult to achieve. If it is not possible, use one of the following supported methods.

### Use Cython¶

cython is a meta-language that allows you to write c-code in python (with some extra syntax), and also access all features of C/C++ as well as automatic python bindings. In cython code, for-loops are fast, and there is even support for parallelism (e.g. OpenMP) via cython.parallel for even faster code. Cython code is allowed in ctapipe, and must be stored in * .pyx files that need to be added to setup.py using cythonize (then you always need to run setup.py build to make sure they are compiled whenever they change)

### Use Numba¶

numba allows you to automatically compile a python function via the LLVM compiler backend the first time a funciton is called (“just in time compilation”). The advantage over cython is that there is no special syntax, and no compilation step ,however as a somewhat “black-box” it does not always improve your code without some help. See the numba documentation for more info.

### Use C/C++ code and wrap it¶

This is only recommended if the other methods fail, or if there is existing code that is shared with other non-python-based systems, as it is the most complex. We support only the following c-binding systems for code within ctapipe:

• ctypes (built into python, good for simple cases)

• cffi (for more complex wrapping and building)

• cython (can be used for wrapping as well as coding)

We do not recommend swig, as it introduces yet another language binding (the swig definition file) that includes both C and Python code, and is thus difficult to track and debug.