GNU Astronomy Utilities



7.1.5.1 Input to Statistics

The following set of options are for specifying the input/outputs of Statistics. There are many other input/output options that are common to all Gnuastro programs including Statistics, see Input/Output options for those.

-c STR/INT
--column=STR/INT

The column to use when the input file is a table with more than one column. See Selecting table columns for a full description of how to use this option. For more on how tables are read in Gnuastro, please see Tables.

-g FLT
--greaterequal=FLT

Limit the range of inputs into those with values greater and equal to what is given to this option. None of the values below this value will be used in any of the processing steps below.

-l FLT
--lessthan=FLT

Limit the range of inputs into those with values less-than what is given to this option. None of the values greater or equal to this value will be used in any of the processing steps below.

-Q FLT[,FLT]
--qrange=FLT[,FLT]

Specify the range of usable inputs using the quantile. This option can take one or two quantiles to specify the range. When only one number is input (let’s call it \(Q\)), the range will be those values in the quantile range \(Q\) to \(1-Q\). So when only one value is given, it must be less than 0.5. When two values are given, the first is used as the lower quantile range and the second is used as the larger quantile range.

The quantile of a given element in a dataset is defined by the fraction of its index to the total number of values in the sorted input array. So the smallest and largest values in the dataset have a quantile of 0.0 and 1.0. The quantile is a very useful non-parametric (making no assumptions about the input) relative measure to specify a range. It can best be understood in terms of the cumulative frequency plot, see Histogram and Cumulative Frequency Plot. The quantile of each horizontal axis value in the cumulative frequency plot is the vertical axis value associate with it.