Sherpa: An Open Source Python Fitting Package

TL;DR

Sherpa is an open source Python package that offers flexible, extensible tools for fitting complex models to data, supporting interactive analysis and application in multiwavelength astronomy.

Contribution

It introduces a versatile, user-friendly Python library for data fitting with customizable models, statistics, and optimization methods, enhancing astronomical data analysis capabilities.

Findings

Supports complex model expressions for data fitting

Extensible architecture for user-defined models and methods

Applicable to multiwavelength astronomical data analysis

Abstract

We present an overview of Sherpa, an open source Python project, and discuss its development history, broad design concepts and capabilities. Sherpa contains powerful tools for combining parametric models into complex expressions that can be fit to data using a variety of statistics and optimization methods. It is easily extensible to include user-defined models, statistics, and optimization methods. It provides a high-level User Interface for interactive data-analysis, such as within a Jupyter notebook, and it can also be used as a library component, providing fitting and modeling capabilities to an application. We include a few examples of Sherpa applications to multiwavelength astronomical data. The code is available GitHub: https://github.com/sherpa/sherpa