Reconsider `DataResidualArray`

[snwnde]

This should be more a dicussion than an issue, and it has been opened only because the discussion zone is not activated here.

Out of my proper experience in the need of LISA data containers, I would love to advocate amending the DataResidualArray class in the following manners,

• Separate the containers for timeseries and frequency series. Each of them would be a subclass of a general base data container class to inherit common methods. A natural consequence of this would be, the transformation from timeseries to frequency series (and vice versa) would no longer be implicit, but rather explicitly performed when required. This has the advantage of,

  • allowing to easily apply arbitrary tapering window
  • allowing easy extension to time-frequency representations
  • conceptually decoupling measurements from theories (waveform model)

• Provide interfaces that aggregate signals of multiple channels and harmonics. It would be easier for the likelihood computation classes to work with these interfaces since the information on channels (and in some scenarios, the harmonics as well) is needed by the likelihood calculation. Note the 'template' aggregation model could be different from that for 'data', as the latter models the measurements so that they are recorded at the same time grid and can be represented on the same frequency (or time-frequency) grid, whereas the former can be generated on grids of arbitrary choice, possibly different across harmonics according to the need.

[mikekatz04]

Hi Senwen, thank you for the suggestions. I need to open the discussion setup I suppose.

Here is my response:

1. I think a lot of people get confused about transforms and units and setting up the inner product dealing with different domains. DataResidualArray is designed to be the user interface that makes all of that go under the hood. However, I completely agree about the setup you are suggesting. I think in my head, I was planning to set it up effectively exactly as you have described with DataResidualArray remaining the highest level user interface that uses your described implementation. Unfortunately, I did not do this yet because I ran out of time before the workshop.