repytah: An Open-Source Python Package for Building Aligned Hierarchies for Sequential Data

Authors

• Chenhui Jia, Smith College
• Lizette Carpenter, Smith College
• Thu Tran, Smith College
• Amanda Y. Liu, Smith College
• Sasha Yeutseyva, Smith College
• Mariun Tapal, Smith College
• Yingke Wang, Columbia University
• Zoie Kexin Zhou, Smith College
• Jordan Moody, Smith College
• Denise Nava, Smith College
• Eleanor Donaher, Smith College
• Lillian Yusha Jiang, Smith College
• Ben Bruncati, Smith College
• Katherine M. Kinnaird, Smith CollegeFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-2023

Publication Title

The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)

Abstract

We introduce repytah, a Python package that constructs the aligned hierarchies representation that contains all possible structure-based hierarchical decompositions for a finite length piece of sequential data aligned on a common time axis. In particular, this representation–introduced by Kinnaird (2016) with music-based data (like musical recordings or scores) as the primary motivation–is intended for sequential data where repetitions have particular meaning (such as a verse, chorus, motif, or theme). Although the original motivation for the aligned hierarchies representation was finding structure for music-based data streams, there is nothing inherent in the construction of these representations that limits repytah to only being used on sequential data that is music-based.

The repytah package builds these aligned hierarchies by first extracting repeated structures (of all meaningful lengths) from the self-dissimilarity matrix (SDM) for a piece of sequential data. Intentionally repytah uses the SDM as the starting point for constructing the aligned hierarchies, as an SDM cannot be reversed-engineered back to the original signal and allows for researchers to collaborate with signals that are protected either by copyright or under privacy considerations. This package is a Python translation of the original MATLAB code by Kinnaird (2014) with additional documentation, and the code has been updated to leverage efficiencies in Python.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rights

© The authors

Version

Version of Record

Recommended Citation

Jia, Chenhui; Carpenter, Lizette; Tran, Thu; Liu, Amanda Y.; Yeutseyva, Sasha; Tapal, Mariun; Wang, Yingke; Zhou, Zoie Kexin; Moody, Jordan; Nava, Denise; Donaher, Eleanor; Jiang, Lillian Yusha; Bruncati, Ben; and Kinnaird, Katherine M., "repytah: An Open-Source Python Package for Building Aligned Hierarchies for Sequential Data" (2023). Computer Science: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/csc_facpubs/362