Compiling binaries

Some external code packages require compiled binary code to be used. Compilation of the mex code is handled by compile_mex as part of the install script, but the TISEAN package binaries need to be compiled separately in the command line.

Compiling mex code

Many of the operations (especially external code packages) rely on mex functions (pieces of code written in C or fortran), that need to be compiled to run natively on a given system architecture. To ensure that as many operations as possible run successfully on your data, you should compile these mex functions for your system. This requires working compilers (e.g., gcc, g++) to be installed on your system, which can be configured using mex -setup (cf. doc mex for more information).

Once mex is set up, the mex functions used in the time-series code repository can be compiled by navigating to the Toolboxes directory and then running compile_mex.

Compiling the TISEAN binaries

Some operations rely on the TISEAN nonlinear time-series analysis package, which Matlab accesses via the terminal using system commands, so the TISEAN binaries cannot be installed from within Matlab, but instead must be installed from the command line. If you are running Linux or Mac, we will assume that you are familiar with the command line, while those running Windows will require an alternate method to install TISEAN, as explained below.

Installing TISEAN on Linux or Mac

In the command line (not within Matlab), navigate to the Toolboxes/Tisean_3.0.1 directory of the repository, then run the following chain of commands:

$ ./configure
$ make clean
$ make
$ make install

This should install the TISEAN binaries in your ~/bin/ directory (you can instead install into a system-wide directory, /usr/bin, for example, by running ./configure –prefix=/usr). Additional information about the TISEAN installation process is provided on the TISEAN website.

If installation was successful then you should be able to access the newly-compiled binaries from the commandline, e.g., typing the command which poincare should return the path to the TISEAN function poincare. Otherwise, you should check that the install directory is in your system path, e.g., by adding the following:

    export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin

to your ~/.bash_profile (and running source ~/.bash_profile to update).

The path where TISEAN is installed will also have to be in Matlab’s environment path, which is added by startup.m, assuming that the binaries are stored in ~/bin. The startup.m code also adds the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, which is also required for TISEAN to function properly.

If you choose to use a custom location for the TISEAN binaries, that is not in the default Matlab system path (getenv('PATH') in Matlab), then you will have to add this path manually. You can test that Matlab can see the TISEAN binaries by typing, for example, the following into Matlab:

!which poincare

If Matlab’s system paths are set up correctly, this command should return the path to your compiled TISEAN binary, poincare.

Installing TISEAN on Windows

If you are running Matlab from Windows, you will need a mechanism for Matlab to call system commands and find compiled TISEAN binaries. There are two options:

1. Install Cygwin on your machine. Cygwin provides a Linux distribution-like environment on Windows. Use this environment to compile and install TISEAN (as per the instructions above for Linux or Mac), which will require it to have C and fortran compilers installed. Matlab will then also need to be launched from Cygwin, using the command: matlab &. This instance of Matlab should then be able to call system commands through cygwin, including the ability to access the TISEAN binaries.

2. Sacrifice operations that rely on TISEAN. In total, TISEAN-based operations account for approximately 300 operations in the operation library. Although they provide important, well-tested implementations of nonlinear time-series analysis methods, it's not the end of the world if you decide it's too much trouble to install and are ok to miss out on these methods (see below on how to explicitly remove them from a computed library).

Ignoring TISEAN functions

If you decide not to use functions from the TISEAN package, you should initialize your dataset with the TISEAN functions removed. You could do this by removing them from you INP_ops.txt file when initializing your dataset, or you could remove them from your initialized hctsa dataset by filtering on the 'tisean' keyword.

For example, to filter a local Matlab hctsa file (e.g., HCTSA.mat), you can use the following: TS_LocalClearRemove('raw','ops',TS_GetIDs('tisean','raw','ops'),true);, which will remove all operations with the 'tisean' keyword from the hctsa dataset in HCTSA.mat.

[If you are using a mySQL database to store the results of your hctsa calculations, TISEAN functions can be removed from the database as follows: SQL_ClearRemove('ops',SQL_GetIDs('ops',0,'tisean',{}),true)].