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knaidoo29 / mistree

A python package for constructing and analysing minimum spanning trees.
MIT License
48 stars 23 forks source link

Expand "statement of need" #4

Closed zonca closed 5 years ago

zonca commented 5 years ago

Currently the introduction in the docs quite short:

MiSTree is designed with the intent of being an easy to use minimum spanning tree library. The methods and statistics used in the module are discussed in the paper “Beyond two-point statistics: using the Minimum Spanning Tree as a tool for cosmology” [ArXiv=1907.00989] which can be found here.

Could you expand it and give a summary of how spanning trees are used in cosmology? Can you add this summary also to the README of the github repo?

knaidoo29 commented 5 years ago

I've changed it to this:

The Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) has been used in a broad range of scientific research including computer science, epidemiology, social sciences, particle physics, astronomy and cosmology. Its success in these field has been driven by its sensitivity to the spatial distribution of points and the patterns within. MiSTree, a public Python package, allows a user to construct the MST in a variety of coordinates systems, including Celestial coordinates used in astronomy. The package enables the MST to be constructed quickly by initially using a k-nearest neighbour graph (rather than a matrix of pairwise distances) which is then fed to Kruskal's algorithm to construct the MST. MiSTree enables a user to measure the statistics of the MST and provides classes for binning the MST statistics (into histograms) and plotting the distributions. Including the MST in parameter estimation studies in cosmology will enable the inclusion of high-order statistics information from the cosmic web. This information has traditionally been unexploited due to the computational cost of calculating N-point statistics.

In both the REAME and documentation.

zonca commented 5 years ago

it looks good thanks