Abstract

Unlike arrays and tables, histograms in Python have usually been denied their own object, and have been represented as a single operation producing several arrays. Boost-histogram is a new Python library that provides histograms that can be filled, manipulated, sliced, and projected as objects. Building on top of the Boost libraries’ Histogram in C++14 provided interesting distribution and design challenges with useful solutions. This is meant to be a foundation that others can build on; in the Scikit-HEP project1, a physicist friendly front-end \textquotedbl{}Hist\textquotedbl{} and a conversion package \textquotedbl{}Aghast\textquotedbl{} are already being designed around boost-histogram.

Keywords:HistogramAnalysisData processingData reductionNumPyAggregation