Migration guide for previous users of `astrodendro`¶

The astrodendro package has been in development for a couple of years, and we have recently undertaken an effort to prepare the package for a first release, which involved tidying up the programming interface to the package, and re-writing large sections. This means that the present version of astrodendro will likely not work with scripts you had if you were using the original astrodendro packages from @astrofrog and @brandenmacdonald’s repositories.

This page summarizes the main changes in the new code, and how to adapt your code to ensure that it will work correctly. This only covers changes that will break your code, but you are encouraged to look through the rest of the documentation to read about new features! Also, only the main backward-incompatible changes are mentioned, but for any questions on changes not mentioned here, please open an issue on GitHub.

Computing a dendrogram¶

Rather than computing a dendrogram using:

d = Dendrogram(data)
d.compute(...)

you should now use:

d = Dendrogram.compute(data)

In addition, the following options for compute have been renamed:

minimum_flux is now min_value (since we expect dendrograms to be used not only for images, but also e.g. density fields).
minimum_delta is now min_delta
minimum_npix is now min_npix

Dendrogram methods and attributes¶

The following dendrogram methods have changed:

get_leaves() has now been replaced by a leaves attribute (it is no longer a method.)
the to_hdf5() and from_hdf5() methods have been replaced by save_to()

`Leaf` and `Branch` classes¶

The Leaf and Branch classes no longer exist, and have been replaced by a single Structure class that instead has is_leaf and is_branch attributes. Thus, if you were checking if something was a leaf by doing e.g.:

if type(s) == Leaf:
    # code here

or:

if isinstance(s, Leaf):
     # code here

then you will instead need to use:

if s.is_leaf:
     # code here

Leaf and branch attributes¶

The following leaf and branch attributes have changed:

f has been replaced by a method called values() that can take a subtree= option that indicates whether pixels in sub-structures should be included.
coords has been replaced by a method called indices() that can take a subtree= option that indicates whether pixels in sub-structures should be included.
height now has a different definition - it is vmax for a leaf, or the smallest vmin of the children for a branch - this is used when plotting the dendrogram, to know at what height to plot the structure.

Interactive visualization¶

Visualizing the results of the dendrogram is now much easier, and does not require the additional astrocube package. To launch the interactive viewer (which requires only Matplotlib), once the dendrogram has been computed, you can do:

>>> d.viewer()

and the interactive viewer will launch. It will however no longer have the option to re-compute the dendrogram from the window, and will also no longer have an IPython terminal. For the latter, we recommend you consider using the Glue package.

Migration guide for previous users of astrodendro¶