[Rivet] aidamerge

[Hannes Jung]

Dear Andy

thanks for your mail.
I understand that this all takes time for development and testing.
I am happy to help in debugging as much as I can (although this might be limited). I am just lost how to correct it .... this is why I am asking for help...

The problem seem to appear in lines like:
    <dataPoint>
      <measurement errorPlus="5.000000e+00" value="5.000000e+00" errorMinus="5.000000e+00"/>
      <measurement errorPlus="nan" value="nan" errorMinus="nan"/>
    </dataPoint>
    <dataPoint>
      <measurement errorPlus="5.000000e+00" value="1.500000e+01" errorMinus="5.000000e+00"/>
      <measurement errorPlus="inf" value="inf" errorMinus="inf"/>
    </dataPoint>

The errPlus and errMinus values I can correct with the method which Daniel proposed, but I cannot get it working for the value="inf" and also not for those with "nan"..... I am just not used to Python...

thanks again
cheers
hannes


On 21.08.2011, at 12:04, Andy Buckley wrote:

Hi Hannes,

We understand that being able to merge histograms is an important feature. At the moment, however, you can't do it properly and generally, because our data storage does not support it. This is an historical accident rather than a design intent, but we only have a small developer team, and despite serious intentions to fix this for several *years* there has been much more demand for new analyses and new analysis functionality than for updated histogram persistency. We can only do so much at once, and until recently all use-cases could make do with simply using long runs.

I'm pleased to say that the replacement which will support all this and more (there are *many* things that we don't like about AIDA) is very well underway, but for now you have to make sure that the example approximate-merging script is doing what you need it to do. It's not ideal and we're working to improve on that situation, but it takes time. This is a physics package, not Microsoft Word -- physics users need to be prepared to open the code a little bit and do some debugging or hacking... especially when that code was only intended as an example.

In your problem case I suspect that the merging algorithm *is* appropriate, but that the numbers being entered are extremely large... so large that they are overflowing the Python (double precision) float type! So this anyway needs more debugging from your side than just sending us the crash traceback... a *minimal* set of AIDA files that reproduce the problem would help, or alternatively just inserting a print statement or two before the offending line.

In short, we need more information to help in this case, and for the general solution we're working on it. This will still take a while because a lot of migration and testing needs to happen. Telling us that it's not good enough won't make that happen faster, I'm afraid -- some development help in the last two years would have done, but it's even too late for that now. We'll at some point have a beta release with this feature, so I hope you'll be able to give us some feedback.

Best wishes,
Andy

PS. You mentioned being able to make ratios in the plotting phase... well, you can, but again it involves writing code. And I don't see that changing: we can't make a script with a "magically do what I want" option flag! Allowing merging *before* the finalise step is something we would like to do, but which requires a *lot* of design and planning. If you have any bright ideas about how this can be done nicely (i.e. uniformly for all analyses, and in the user-rather-than-developer mode) then please get in touch :)


On 21/08/11 08:15, Hannes Jung wrote:
Dear Andy et all

thanks a lot for your mail and your explanations.

I understand that aidamerge is not an official script.
However, in a usable histogramming package one must be able to add
histograms at the end and possible errors must be trated, otherwise the
package is not really usable for users... it might be fine for developers.
In Root as well as in the old hbook/paw package we had options which
treated adding histograms properly, of course one has to be careful to
add the proper things, and adding ratios might be tricky.... but then
there must be an option to do the ratio while plotting.

There is of course an issue, whether whatever is added does make sense.
But the package should work, or give an error message and treat that
somehow, but not just crashing....

The Aida package is nice and I like very much the rivet-mkhtml script
which make life much easier.... but I do not want to develop the
histogramming package, I just want to use it and to be sure that it does
what it is supposed to do....

Don't understand me wrong, I appreciate very much the help and support I
get and got in the past solving problems with the histogramming
package... but... I just want to use it.....

Thanks a lot for your support

Cheers

Hannes

On 20.08.2011, at 19:30, Andy Buckley wrote:

Hi Hannes and all,

Please, note that the aidamerge script is not an official Rivet
script: it's an example of how you might write a script to do some
*approximate* statistical merging of independent runs.

Because we don't currently store enough information to do the merging
exactly, this script has to make some guesses, and that's why we don't
offically support it. So you should make sure that it's doing merging
appropriate for your data -- using it blindly *will* lead to errors.

So have a look in the code. From my own glances inside it, the
approximate merging algorithm used assumes that the samples you are
merging of the same size (you could add scale factors to a local copy
if you need them), and that you are either merging normalised
histograms or profile histograms -- if your data is of a different
type, most notably un-normalised histograms, then the assumed error
scaling will be incorrect. You mentioned ratios, Hannes: I *think* the
scaling is probably correct, i.e. more data makes the values converge
to the (weighted) mean of the runs and the errors get smaller as
1/sqrt(N)... but it depends on exactly what you're doing.

Andy


On 20/08/11 13:50, Hannes Jung wrote:
Hi Daniel

hm... it seems the messages below come from somewhere else....
it didn't change even when setting the error to 1 instead of 1E308....

Does anyone knows how to fix this ? ....

Cheers
Hannes

On 20.08.2011, at 14:32, Daniel Weyh wrote:

Ok, ... I don't know at all what the plottings themselve do.
Probably using another float 1e+20 or somethin instead of 1e308 will
not cause an overflow...

But, I'm afk at the moment... Sry

Am 20.08.2011 um 14:20 schrieb Hannes Jung <hannes.jung at cern.ch<mailto:hannes.jung at cern.ch>
<mailto:hannes.jung at cern.ch>
<mailto:hannes.jung at cern.ch>>:

Hi Daniel again

maybe I was too fast,.... the aidamerge did work, but when plotting
it i get the follwoing errors:

Plotting
cascade-uPDFs/FWDCENTPHENO/Delta_phi_Delta_eta_eq_10_Et_gt_10_GeV.dat
(33 remaining)
Plotting
cascade-uPDFs/FWDCENTPHENO/Delta_phi_Delta_eta_eq_10_Et_gt_30_GeV.dat
(32 remaining)
Error: cannot convert float NaN to integer
Error: cannot convert float NaN to integer
Plotting
cascade-uPDFs/FWDCENTPHENO/Delta_phi_Delta_eta_eq_2_Et_gt_10_GeV.dat
(29 remaining)
Error: cannot convert float infinity to integer

and then rivet-mkhtml gets stuck...
Hm....

thanks a lot
Cheers
Hannes

On 20.08.2011, at 13:53, Daniel Weyh wrote:

Sry, I didn't know where you got your copy from.
It is uploaded to SVN (r3300).
Please check this out or look at
<http://projects.hepforge.org/rivet/trac/browser/contrib/aidamerge><http://projects.hepforge.org/rivet/trac/browser/contrib/aidamerge>http://projects.hepforge.org/rivet/trac/browser/contrib/aidamerge

Hope it helps,
Daniel


Am 20.08.2011 um 13:35 schrieb Hannes Jung
<<mailto:hannes.jung at cern.ch>hannes.jung at cern.ch
<mailto:hannes.jung at cern.ch>>:

Hi Daniel

thanks a lot..... I guess this should work.... I just don't know
where to change what...
could you perhaps tell me a bit more what to change in which line,
or perhaps upload the patched version somewhere ?

Thanks very much
cheers
hannes

On 20.08.2011, at 13:27, Daniel Weyh wrote:

Dear Hannes,

Dear Riveties

adding several aida files works fine, only in some cases I get
the error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./aidamerge", line 65, in <module>
sum_err2 += h.getBin(i).getErr()**2
OverflowError: (34, 'Numerical result out of range')

I guess it comes when a histo is not properly filled (fro example
when a ratio is taken).
Is there a way to prevent these error message, and to continue
with the program ?

I added a patch to catch the exception, use float('inf') during
summing up and in the write out step this 'inf' is converted to a
vee..eery large float.
Does this work for you?

@others: Is this the way it should work - or should we somehow
exclude such bins?!?

Cheers,
Daniel



***********************************************************************
Hannes Jung
Email:
<mailto:Hannes.Jung at cern.ch><mailto:Hannes.Jung at cern.ch>Hannes.Jung at cern.ch
<mailto:Hannes.Jung at cern.ch>
mobile :+49 40 8998 93741
<http://www.desy.de/~jung><http://www.desy.de/~jung>http://www.desy.de/~jung

Tel: +49 (0) 40 8998 3741 (DESY)
Tel: +41 22 76 62602 (CERN)
CERN - PH
42-2-033
CH-1211 Genève 23
Switzerland
***********************************************************************






***********************************************************************
Hannes Jung
Email: <mailto:Hannes.Jung at cern.ch>Hannes.Jung at cern.ch
<mailto:Hannes.Jung at cern.ch>
mobile :+49 40 8998 93741
<http://www.desy.de/~jung>http://www.desy.de/~jung
Tel: +49 (0) 40 8998 3741 (DESY)
Tel: +41 22 76 62602 (CERN)
CERN - PH
42-2-033
CH-1211 Genève 23
Switzerland
***********************************************************************






***********************************************************************
Hannes Jung
Email: Hannes.Jung at cern.ch<mailto:Hannes.Jung at cern.ch> <mailto:Hannes.Jung at cern.ch>
<mailto:Hannes.Jung at cern.ch>
mobile :+49 40 8998 93741
http://www.desy.de/~jung
Tel: +49 (0) 40 8998 3741 (DESY)
Tel: +41 22 76 62602 (CERN)
CERN - PH
42-2-033
CH-1211 Genève 23
Switzerland
***********************************************************************






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--
Dr Andy Buckley
SUPA Advanced Research Fellow
Particle Physics Experiment Group, University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.



***********************************************************************
Hannes Jung
Email: Hannes.Jung at cern.ch<mailto:Hannes.Jung at cern.ch> <mailto:Hannes.Jung at cern.ch>
mobile :+49 40 8998 93741
http://www.desy.de/~jung
Tel: +49 (0) 40 8998 3741 (DESY)
Tel: +41 22 76 62602 (CERN)
CERN - PH
42-2-033
CH-1211 Genève 23
Switzerland
***********************************************************************






--
Dr Andy Buckley
SUPA Advanced Research Fellow
Particle Physics Experiment Group, University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.



***********************************************************************
Hannes Jung
Email: Hannes.Jung at cern.ch<mailto:Hannes.Jung at cern.ch>
mobile :+49 40 8998 93741
http://www.desy.de/~jung
Tel: +49 (0) 40 8998 3741 (DESY)
Tel: +41 22 76 62602 (CERN)
CERN - PH
42-2-033
CH-1211 Genève 23
Switzerland
***********************************************************************




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