Your: Your Unified Reader

The advancement in signal processing and GPU based systems has enabled new transient detectors at various telescopes to perform much more sensitive searches than their predecessors. Typically the data output from the telescopes is in one of the two commonly used formats: psrfits and Sigproc filterbank. Software developed for transient searches often only works with one of these two formats, limiting their general applicability. Therefore, researchers have to write custom scripts to read/write the data in their format of choice before they can begin any data analysis relevant for their research. \textsc{Your} (Your Unified Reader) is a python-based library that unifies the data processing across multiple commonly used formats. \textsc{Your} implements a user-friendly interface to read and write in the data format of choice. It also generates unified metadata corresponding to the input data file for a quick understanding of observation parameters and provides utilities to perform common data analysis operations. \textsc{Your} also provides several state-of-the-art radio frequency interference mitigation (RFI) algorithms, which can now be used during any stage of data processing (reading, writing, etc.) to filter out artificial signals.


Summary
The understanding of fast radio transients like pulsar single pulses, rotating radio transients (RRATs), and especially Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) has evolved rapidly over the last decade. This is primarily due to dedicated campaigns by sensitive radio telescopes to search for transients. The advancement in signal processing and GPU processing systems has enabled new transient detectors at various telescopes to perform much more sensitive searches than their predecessors due to the ability to find and process FRB candidates in realtime or near-real-time. Typically the data output from the telescopes is in one of the two commonly used formats: psrfits (Hotan, van Straten, and Manchester 2004) and Sigproc filterbank (Lorimer 2011). Software developed for transient searches often only works with one of these two formats, limiting their general applicability. Therefore, researchers have to write custom scripts to read/write the data in their format of choice before they can begin any data analysis relevant for their research. This has led to the development of several python libraries to manage one or the other data format (like pysigproc, psrfits, sigpyproc, etc). Still, no general tool exists which can work across data formats.

Statement of need
Your (Your Unified Reader) is a python-based library that unifies the data processing across multiple commonly used formats. Your was conceived initially to perform data ingestion for The Petabyte FRB search Project (TPP), which will uniformly search a large number of datasets from telescopes around the world for FRBs. As this project is going to process data in different formats from multiple telescopes worldwide, a unified reader was required to streamline the search pipeline. Your implements a user-friendly interface to read and write in the data format of choice. It also generates unified metadata corresponding to the input data file for a quick understanding of observation parameters and provides utilities to perform common data analysis operations. Your also provides several state-of-the-art radio frequency interference mitigation (RFI) algorithms Nita and Gary 2010), which can now be used during any stage of data processing (reading, writing, etc.) to filter out artificial signals.
Your can be used at the data ingestion step of any transient search pipeline and can provide data and observation parameters in a format-independent manner. Generic tools can thus be used to perform the search and further data analysis. It also enables online Aggarwal et al., (2020 processing like RFI flagging, decimation, subband search, etc.; functions for some of these are already available in Your. It can also be used to perform analysis of individual candidate events (using Candidate class): generate candidate data cutouts, create publication-ready visualizations, and perform GPU accelerated pre-processing for candidate classification (Agarwal, Aggarwal, et al. 2020). It also consists of functions to run commonly used single-pulse search software Heimdall (Barsdell 2012) on any input data format.
Your will not only benefit experienced researchers but also new undergraduate and graduate students who otherwise have to face a significant bottleneck to understand various data formats and develop custom tools to access the data before any analysis can be done on it. Moreover, Your is written purely in python, which is a commonly used language within Astronomy. It also comes with comprehensive documentation and example notebooks to make it easier to get started.
Your uses the matplotlib library (Hunter 2007) for plotting, and also makes use of various numpy (Harris et al. 2020), scipy