Getting the most out of your plots

Outline

• #Introduction
  • #Terminology
• #Creating histograms in org.lcsim
• #Saving your work
  • #Saving your plots as image files
  • #Saving your data in the AIDA format
• #Changing the layout
  • #Changing the title and the axis labels
  • #Changing the appearance of the plot
    • #Changing the font
• #Basic Fitting
• #Advanced Tutorials

Here is a possible outline for this section:

• usage of the static AIDA defaultInstance
• explanations of basic types: clouds 1D/2D, histograms 1D/2D, tuples, etc.
  • defining each type (e.g. bin sizes for histograms, etc.)
  • filling each type
• creating plots from a sample Driver (use Analysis101 or some other template)
• changing axis label: text value, font, size, etc.
• changing axis range min/max
• changing to log scale
• changing filled/unfilled and colors for value bars, error bars
• modifying fields that show in statistics box

• saving and reloading plots using .aida files
• importing into a Powerpoint presentation
• basic fitting (would keep this pretty simple)

It would probably be best done with more than one page.

--Jeremy M.

Introduction

For plotting and fitting, org.lcsim provides an implementation of the Abstract Interfaces for Data Analysis AIDA.
AIDA objects is organized in Trees, which can have a directory structure like a file system.
This tutorial will assume that you are working in JAS3 and have either loaded an existing AIDA file or created objects in AIDA with the org.lcsim plugin.

If you have executed some of the examples in JAS3, you have already used AIDA in lines like these:

AIDA aida = AIDA.defaultInstance();
...
aida.cloud1D("nTracks").fill(tracks.size());

These lines create and fill an unbinned one-dimensional histogram named nTracks with the return value of tracks.size()

Teminology

AIDA provides two different kinds of histograms: binned and unbinned.
Binned histograms are called IHistogram1D, IHistogram2D, IHistogram3D for one, two and three-dimensional histograms.
Similarly, unbinned histograms are called ICloud1D, ICloud2D, ICloud3D

Getting started

Creating histograms in org.lcsim

Viewing and Loading Plots

Lets start with viewing AIDA objects. You can either create them with the AIDA examples, the org.lcsim examples or you can load an existing AIDA file with File->Open File... in the menu.
All AIDA objects are arranged in trees. You can have many trees open at the same time; they are represented as Folders, . Trees can contain, e.g. Clouds and/or Histograms , with the name of the object appearing next to it. If a folder is closed, double-clicking will open it and display its contents. Similarly, double-clicking on an open folder will close it, so that the contents are hidden.

A double-click on a Cloud or a Histogram will cause JAS3 to plot the contents.

In order to display an item together with an already displayed item, select Overlay on Current Plot from the context menu

Saving your work

Saving your plots as image files

JAS3 supports various graphics formats, for both bitmap and vector graphics.

The following list gives a brief description of the most often used formats

Saving Plots is a trivial task in JAS3:

• You want to save the whole page:
  • Select File->Save As...
• You want to save only one plot in the current page
  • Right click on the plot and select Save Plot As...

Saving your data in the AIDA format

In order to save your whole tree with all Cloud and Histogram objects, right-click on the folder icon , and select Save As... from the context menu. Please select a filename with the extension .aida so that you will be able to recognize the file later.

Changing the layout

Thanks to the close integration of JAS3 and AIDA, a plethora of manipulations is availabe via menus and dialogs. This tutorial can merely give an overview over the most commonly used ones.

Changing the title and the axis labels

• Right-click on the plot and select Plot Properties... from the menu. You will see tabs that represent different regions of the plot.
• The Title of the plot can be found under the General tab. Change it so something descriptive and click on the Apply button to see it change.
• The axis labels can be changed under the Y Axis and X Axis tabs, respectively. After entering the label in the text field, click the Apply button to see it change

  Changing the appearance of the plot

  Changing the font

  You can change the font of the title or the axis labels. Open the context menu of the label you want to change by right-clicking on the text. The first item in the context menu is either Title Font... or Axis Font... depending on where you click.

  Changing the color, line and filling options.

  When overlaying two or more histograms, oftentimes important information is hidden behind the opaque histogram bars. In this case it is convenient to access the context menu with a right click and selecting Fill Histogram Bars. More sophisticated changes can be made by accessing the Plot Properties... dialog from the context menu. The Data tab shows all data sets contained in the current plot. Click each data set to access its options. After changing an option, click the Apply button to see the changes.
  You can select for each data set whether you want to display it. JAS3 has also the option to plot a secondary Y Axis. You can select which of the two possible axes to associate your data with.
  1D Plot Style/2D Plot Style: This is where you change the color and appearance of each plot. Click apply after your changes to confirm that this is what you wanted|

Basic Fitting

Advanced Tutorials

• The second part of this Tutorial has more examples on fitting and scripting as well as Tuples
• The Documentation on the AIDA homepage contains many advanced examples together with code samples that demonstrate the features
• The Documentation on the PAIDA homepage contains many small examples of Python scripts together with images that demonstrate advanced AIDA capabilities. At the point of this writing, PAIDA contains some functionality that cannot be found in the JAIDA implementation, such as 3D plotting.