Welcome to PyBen’s documentation!

BEN (short for Binary-Ensemble) is a compression algorithm designed for efficient storage and access of ensembles of districting plans, and was designed to work primarily as a companion to the GerrySuite collection of packages (GerryChain, GerryTools, FRCW) and to also be compatible with other ensemble generators (e.g. ForestRecom, Sequential Monte Carlo [SMC]).

This is a package containing some Python bindings for the for the Binary-Ensemble <https://crates.io/crates/binary-ensemble> Rust library. In particular, this package provides some easy tools for compressing and decompressing ensembles of districting plans, as well as some utilities for working with ensembles stored in the BEN and XBEN formats.

Installation

To install PyBen, you can just use pip!

pip install py-ben

PyBEN Tutorial

• An Introduction to Using PyBen
  • Setup for the Tutorial
  • Converting between file types
    • BEN compression
    • XBEN Compression
    • Decompression
  • PyBen and GerryChain
    • Encoding
    • Decoding
    • Subsampling

API Reference

• API Reference
  • pyben