Getting Started with PyModelFit

Requirements

Before you do anything with PyModelFit, you’ll need:

• Python 2.5 or higher (2.6 highly recommended), although 3.x is not yet supported.
• numpy
• scipy

Follow the instructions on those sites, or, far easier, install them as packages from your operating system (e.g. apt-get or the synaptic GUI on Ubuntu, Macports on OS X, etc.).

Install

Once you have the requirements satisfied, you have a few options for installing pymodelfit.

Note

On most unix-like systems, you will need to either execute these commands as the root user, or preface them with sudo.

If you have pip (the new, better easy installer) or easy_install/setuptools (you should probably install pip...), just run either:

pip install pymodelfit

or:

easy_install pymodelfit

If you are installing from source code, instead, just do:

python setup.py install

Additional Recommended Packages

A few other outside packages add useful functionality to PyModelFit. These are not required, but are highly recommended for the full PyModelFit experience.

For general publication-quality plotting of data and models, the following package is suggested:

• Matplotlib

  Can be installed with pip install matplotlib

To use the useful FitGui interactive model-fitting tool, the following three packages are necessary (with the suggested install command, if you don’t have the package already available on your system):

• Traits

  pip install traits

• TraitsGUI

  pip install traitsGUI

• Chaco

  pip install chaco

For the MultiFitGui model-fitting tool, another package is needed for 3D rendering:

• Mayavi2

  pip install mayavi

Finally, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) fitting is available for models via the pymodelfit.FunctionModel.getMCMC() method. To work, this requires an additional package:

• pymc

  pip install pymc

Developing PyModelFit

PyModelFit is an open source project, and contributions are welcome. The github project page has the development version of the source code, as well as the bug tracker. Code guidelines are the same as for the astropysics project, and are detailed at that project’s documentation page.

You can get the latest version by installing git and running the command:

git clone git://github.com/eteq/pymodelfit.git

then install it via:

python setup.py install

or:

python setup.py develop

Use the second option if you want to easily edit the source code and immediately see your changes in the installed version.