Augur is a DESC forecasting and inference validation tool. The name comes from the official diviners in ancient Rome whose function was to divine whether the gods approved of a proposed undertaking by observing the behavior of birds. Firecrown is the bird species of choice in DESC.

Augur is a wrapper to firecrown that generates synthetic datasets of abitrary complexity and then calls inference engine to either generate full MCMC or a simple second-order derivative at fiducal model to generate a Fisher matrix forecast.

As always, you can force installation through pip like

pip install augur/

or actually inside the augur directory running

python setup.py install

This step-by-step installaion shows you how to get a working environment with firecrown and augur that you can hack away efficiently.

Start by creating a new anaconda environment:

conda create --name forecasting
conda activate forecasting

Next install firecrown and augur. First, let's clean any conda-installed firecrown (skip this if no previous firecrown around)

conda uninstall firecrown --force

Install firecrown dependencies only using:

conda install --only-deps firecrown

Install a repo version of firecrown:

git clone [email protected]:LSSTDESC/firecrown.git
cd firecrown
pip install --no-deps -e .

Now run a pytest to see if things work.

Next repeat the same with augur but checkout the dev branch:

git clone [email protected]:LSSTDESC/augur.git
cd augur
pip install --no-deps -e .

and also test it with pytest.

You are now ready to try a simple forecast as outlined in the next section.

Usage generally follows the firecrown conventions. The input yaml file has three sections corresponding to three steps of a typical forecasting process

• generate contains instructions for generating syntehtic datasets
• analyze contains instructions for running firecrown using the dasets just generates
• postprocess contains instructions for post-processing any data, making plots, latex tables, etc [not implemented yet]

To run something try:

augur examples/srd_y1_3x2.yaml -v

The output will be in

output/fisher.txt