Selfcal Development list

2023 goals:

1. SRDP spring release to promote new capability
2. Fall 2023
   1. heuristic extensions
   2. weblog cleanup
   3. facilitate use for manual imaging scenarios that require selfcal  - gain real world testing benchmarks

Necessary for SRDP release

1. 3 digits past decimal for all values
2. Fix beam comparision ratios in per-solint stats
3. Print pre/post beam info in per-solint table
4. datatype awareness for hif_editimlist
5. need regcal and selfcal aggcont and cube images created and exported

Post-SRDP Release (for Fall 2023)

Imaging heuristics

• selfcal should reject pipeline mitigations internally
  • agg. cont self-calibration should use full image size and pixels per beam (model creation could be compromised otherwise)
  • perform self-calibration even for mitigated sources - extremely beneficial from archival point of view
• Implement low S/N and long baseline heuristics from PS (https://github.com/psheehan/auto_selfcal/tree/lbimprovements)
• Implement mosaic heuristics from PS (https://github.com/psheehan/auto_selfcal/tree/lbimprovements%2Bmosaics%2Bcocal)

QA & messages

•  Fix and suppress some warnings
  • "channel bandwidths ratio?" => see  PIPE-1447 - Getting issue details... STATUS is the result of averaging down to 15.625 MHz channels when there was pre-averaging
  • suppress representative target warnings
• main table:
  • solints to attempt - make the successful solints bolded
  • Mouseover text for success (define as: 'self-calibration solutions accepted for at least one solution interval')
  • Remove phasecenter, cellsize, and imsize from table
  • Remove the 'apply contline' and 'apply cont' columns

main page and results table:

• the page nagivation with expanding sections is not used anywhere else and will be very unfamiliar - some of it is better than what is used elsewhere, but either way we should be more consistent
  • at the very least the buttons that expand alternative sections should have little "v" down arrow, or something indicating that they'll expand.
    or more consistent with the rest of the weblog would be to put all that on a subpage.
  • AAK: I would suggest being consistent with the current hif_makeimages results pages and how they work. Otherwise people are just going to be very confused.
  • I would suggest source list at top with links to each source (again similar to current weblogs)
• the weird 3-dot, 3-line symbol at the start of the line is that takes you back up to the top - probably just ditch that for now.
• add mouseoverDist./Ratio is not defined, and that plot needs explanatory text
• theoretical sensitivity doesn't show up on the plot sometimes, so putting it in the legend is not great.  Ok I found another one where its a horizontal bar - i feel like it should be a gaussian, or the theoretical noise distribution with the right sigma?  comparing a purple bar to a distribution doesn't seem quite right.
• success "yes" looks like a clickable link but it isn't
• down the line it would be good to figure out how to display the large table of numbers graphically - its a lot of numbers to digest.  Or as a first step highlight table cells that indicate something interesting or potentially troubling is hapenning
• the table rendering is joining columns that probably shouldn't be joined, like "rms improvement" and "ratio of beam area" when they're both 1.0
• need to add residual and possibly model images
• RAL: 'Comparison' is unclear as to what it is calculating, and units are odd
• RAL: 'N.F.' → 'Near Field' and similar abbreviations made more clear
• RAL: why is 'flagged solutions by antenna' blank?
• AAK: I would put stop reason higher

QA Plots subpages:

• need the "BACK" button like other subpages,
• again the weird symbol with three dots and three lines doesn't seem to do anything except randomly port me somewhat upwards on the page, so probably should be removed for now.
• "Yes" again is a link that doesn't do anything when clicked
• "Sol summary" needs better explanation and not use "Sol" probably; in particular what is doing the flagging - just gaincal?
• I'm not sure what the gain(phase) plots are intended to be used for - there doesn't seem to be a lot of information there - if one is supposed to note something, I think what to look for should be documented, or better yet a QA score calculated?
• The QA note about "channel bandwidth ratio" doesn't have units and is a really huge number. It's not apparent what this means to me as a user.
• RAL: phase plots need to have consistent scale to be useful as thumbnails.
• RAL: 'Comparison' plot and stats missing here
• RAL: This is where I would expect to see a hif_makeimages style breakout of residuals, etc. that Amanda mentioned via email.

• Assess S/N ratio in the visibility plane
• Don't abbreviate if space
• At least 3 significant digits in RMS

Top table:

• Bold last solution attempted that succeeded
  • Success column helpful as a quick thing
  • Bold rather than colors
  • Do band, phasecenter, spw need to be in table?
    • Want band for VLA
• Don't need both success and apply contline

Theoretical Sensitivity graphs:

• Show theoretical as a Gaussian
• Say that it is the thermal noise gaussian
• Shaded?

Per source breakdown:

• Move Stop reason to top of the page
  • Mouse over and pop up?

Make stop reasons parsable for later

• Preferred to be done in weblog → Actually the casalog is what we want, so we won't have to parse html. (PS: oops sorry, I knew this; my brain must not have been connected to my hands...) → actually, putting it in a QA metric so that it goes in the aquareport is even better, so we don't have to parse anything
• As well as anything else that we might want a cycles worth of information

collapsable per-solint features are confusing → different from rest of the weblog

• Normally would click on something and go to details on another page

initial, final should pull up something similar to hif_makeimages, additional QA, N panel plot

• most concerned with final

3 sig figs on per source tables