Popsynth: A generic astrophysical population synthesis framework

TL;DR

Popsynth is a flexible, object-oriented framework for simulating astrophysical surveys, enabling complex population modeling, selection effects, and data storage for calibration and testing purposes.

Contribution

It introduces a generic, portable framework that allows constructing complex astrophysical populations with customizable distributions and dependencies, enhancing simulation capabilities.

Findings

Supports flexible population sampling and complex dependencies

Enables application of selection functions to simulated data

Stores data in portable HDF5 format for analysis

Abstract

Simulating a survey of fluxes and redshifts (distances) from an astrophysical population is a routine task. \texttt{popsynth} provides a generic, object-oriented framework to produce synthetic surveys from various distributions and luminosity functions, apply selection functions to the observed variables and store them in a portable (HDF5) format. Population synthesis routines can be constructed either using classes or from a serializable YAML format allowing flexibility and portability. Users can not only sample the luminosity and distance of the populations, but they can create auxiliary distributions for parameters which can have arbitrarily complex dependencies on one another. Thus, users can simulate complex astrophysical populations which can be used to calibrate analysis frameworks or quickly test ideas.