Pyecog as a python module¶
Currently the smoothest way to use pyecog is to combine python code and the GUI. While it is possible to do everything in the GUI, it is a little clunky and any uncaught error will currently crash the program.
It is suggested to use jupyter notebooks for ndf to h5 file conversion, feature extraction and the training & applying of classifiers. Furthermore, by interacting with the files through python directly you do not restrict your analysis to pre-coded routines.
Jupyter Notebook crash-course¶
There are many tutorials on the web covering how to use and run jupyter notebooks. For example: https://realpython.com/jupyter-notebook-introduction/ . In short, a notebook contains cells that can be of different types - the primary two being Markdown and Code cell types. Code cells are run by pressing Shift+Enter.
In order to download the notebooks linked below, click on “View page source” after selecting them. Then right click on the page and save the page as a plain text document. Make sure that the extension is “.ipyn” - you may need to delete “.txt” that browsers may automatically add.
To run the notebooks, navigate to the directory in which you have just downloaded the notebook. Here activate your pyecog virtual environment as if you were about to run the GUI (“source activate pyecog_env” for mac/linux, or “activate pyecog_env” for windows) and then type and enter “jupyter notebook”. The notebooks should load in your default web browser.
Loading the pyecog module¶
The easiest place to place and run this notebook is from the pyecog directory downloaded from github, e.g. “pyecog-Development” as the pyecog module will be found in this folder. However, if you want to run the notebook from else where on your computer you first need to make sure that python can find the pyecog module using sys.path.append(). To do this modify and copy the following code into a cell and run it (shift+enter).
import sys
pyecog_path = 'home/jonathan/git_repos/pyecog' # replace this with the pyecog location
sys.path.append(pyecog_path)
If you are on windows you have to deal with the problem that backslashes in your paths are treated escape characters by python. Prefixing the string with ‘r’ prevents this.
pyecog_path_windows = r'home\jonathan\git_repos\pyecog' # replace this with the pyecog location