Reference Manual

This reference manual contains detailed documentation of each component making up Topographica, assuming that the user is already familiar with basic Topographica usage. (See the User Manual and Tutorials for such an introduction.) The reference manual is generated directly from documentation and declarations in the source code, and is often much more verbose than necessary, because many little-used yet often-duplicated methods are listed for each class. Still, the reference for a given component does provide a comprehensive listing of all attributes and methods, inherited or otherwise, which is difficult to obtain from the source code directly and is not covered by the User Manual or Tutorials.

Topographica’s components can be categorized into subprojects (available separately), core packages (required for Topographica), library packages (useful families of components not required for Topographica itself), and other external dependencies (documented separately). Everything but the external dependencies is documented at the main reference manual page, but the different categories of objects are broken down here in a way that’s easier to follow.

Subprojects

param

Support for objects with user-controllable attributes

paramtk

Optional Tk GUI support for param

numbergen

Support for generating streams of scalars, e.g. random distributions; currently available through the imagen module (below)

holoviews

Support for composable and declarative data structures to hold and visualize data and metadata.

imagen

Support for generating 1D, and 2D patterns, and for defining mappings between continuous 2D space and finite matrices

featuremapper

Support for the coordinated presentation of input patterns, collating and analyzing the responses to measure feature maps, tuning curves, receptive fields, PSTHs, etc.

The param, paramtk, numbergen, holoviews, imagen and featuremapper modules are each developed and maintained separately from Topographica, because they are general-purpose packages that can be useful for a wide variety of Python programs. However, they are documented together with Topographica because they were developed alongside Topographica and are used extensively within Topographica.

Core Topographica packages

The Topographica simulator itself is implemented in a set of interrelated packages:

base

Core Topographica-specific functions and classes

plotting

Visualization functions and classes

analysis

Analysis functions and classes (besides plotting)

misc

Miscellaneous independent utility functions and classes

tkgui

Tk-based graphical user interface (GUI)

The base directory contains the most fundamental Topographica classes, implementing basic functionality such as Sheets (arrays of units), Projections (large groups of connections between Sheets), ConnectionFields (spatially localized groups of connections to one unit), and the event-driven Simulation. It relies heavily on the generic support for Parameters (user-controllable attributes) from the param subproject. Together the files in base are independent of the rest of the files in topo/, and act as the primary programming interface on which Topographica is built. The rest of the directories add components used in specific models, or add graphical interfaces.

Library

Beyond the basic simulator implemented in the core packages, Topographica provides an extensive and extensible library of classes that can be used to implement models of various neural systems:

sheet

Sheet classes: 2D arrays of processing units

projection

Projection classes: connections between Sheets

ep

EventProcessor classes: other simulation objects

transferfn

Output functions: apply to matrices to do e.g. normalization or squashing

responsefn

Calculate the response of a unit or a Projection

learningfn

Adjust weights for a unit or a Projection

coordmapper

Determine mapping from one Projection to another

command

High-level user commands

All of the library components are optional, in the sense that they can be deleted or ignored or replaced with custom versions without affecting the code in any of the core packages. (Of course, any specific model that depends on the component would not be able to function without it!)

Each of the library directories can be extended with new classes by simply defining them in your own files, and then making sure that your file has been run or imported before you start the GUI or use the new class in your .ty file. I.e., user-defined classes of these types have the same status as those shipped with Topographica – just make sure they have been defined, and Topographica will find them and use them just like its own classes.

Many of the components come in multiple varieties, to be used at different levels in a model. For instance, there are learning functions that operate on a single unit (type LearningFn), and ones that operate on an entire CFProjection (type CFPLearningFn). The lower level components can be used by providing them to a “Plugin” version of the higher level component, which will apply the lower level version to each unit. For instance, a LearningFn can be used with a CFPLearningFn of type CFPLF_Plugin, and will be applied the same to each unit individually.

Some components also come with an optimized version, usually written in C for speed. The fastest, but least flexible, components will be high-level components written in C, such as CFPLF_Hebbian_opt.

Apart from the Topographica-specific modules described above, Topographica also uses many external libraries, each documented separately.