Pippi - painless parsing, post-processing and plotting of posterior and likelihood samples

TL;DR

Pippi is a user-friendly, configurable software package designed to simplify parsing, post-processing, and creating publication-quality graphics of posterior and likelihood samples in scientific analyses.

Contribution

It introduces a versatile, open-source tool that streamlines the visualization and interpretation of probability density function samples for researchers.

Findings

Facilitates high-quality, customizable plots of posterior and likelihood samples.

Simplifies the process of parsing and post-processing complex statistical samples.

Demonstrates utility with a supersymmetric global fit in dark matter research.

Abstract

Interpreting samples from likelihood or posterior probability density functions is rarely as straightforward as it seems it should be. Producing publication-quality graphics of these distributions is often similarly painful. In this short note I describe pippi, a simple, publicly-available package for parsing and post-processing such samples, as well as generating high-quality PDF graphics of the results. Pippi is easily and extensively configurable and customisable, both in its options for parsing and post-processing samples, and in the visual aspects of the figures it produces. I illustrate some of these using an existing supersymmetric global fit, performed in the context of a gamma-ray search for dark matter. Pippi can be downloaded and followed at http://github.com/patscott/pippi .