Modules

In NuRadioReco, the process of reconstruction event properties from data is done by modules. In principle, each step of an analysis should be done by a dedicated module. For example, one module applies a filter to the channel spectrum and a different module reconstructs the electric field from that channel afterwards. In the case of simulation studies, modules can also be used to simulate aspects of the detector response, e.g. the efieldToVoltageConverter, which calculates the voltages in the antennas from the electric field at each antenna. In principle, modules can be arranged in any order, including loops and if/or branching, though some some modules may require others to be run beforehand. For example, using a module to apply a filter to an electric field only makes sense if the field has been reconstructed by another module beforehand. It is event possible, to combine several modules into a single module, for example to make a standard reconstruction model, that performs a reconstruction with the default settings deemed best for a given experiment.

Basic Module Structure

Each module consists of four components:

  • A constructor to create the module. In a reconstruction, this is usually

called to create the modules before looping over all events in the event file.

  • The begin method. This is used to specify settings that will not change on

an event-by-event basis.

  • The run method. This is executed for each event and executes the task that

the module was built for.

  • The end Method. This is run after the last event was processed for cleanup

or to print information on what the module has done.

These methods should all be called in that order, though the begin and end function can be skipped for some modules.

Logging

Every module MODULE should have in the init function the initalization of a logger with

self.logger = logging.getLogger('NuRadioReco.MODULE')

This expects that the script containing the module sequence initalized a general logger with

import logging
from NuRadioReco.modules.base import module
logger = module.setup_logger(level=logging.WARNING)

This initalizes a parent logger, which determines the overall logging level that is inherited by all modules. This allows to turn DEBUG on for all, for example. It is still possible to change the logging level for individual modules as an overwrite.