========================
Welcome to Psignifit 3.0
========================

Psignifit is a toolbox that allows the user to fit psychometric functions and to test
hypotheses about psychometric data. Compared to the "classical" version of Psignifit,
the new package comes with a number of **additional features**:
    * full Bayesian treatment of psychometric functions including Bayesian model selection and goodness of fit assessment
    * identification of influential observations
    * detection of outliers (potentially to be excluded)
    * new philosophy of defining the shape of the psychometric function allowing for considerably more flexibility in specifiing psychometric function models.

The preferred interface for Psignifit 3.0 is now `Python <http://www.python.org/>`_, but Matlab is also supported. In contrast to
Matlab, Python is a complete programming language that supports virtually all features you
might wish for. Python allows you to perform numerical computations as flexible and fast as
in Matlab. In addition, Python provides features like object oriented programming and simple creation of graphical user interfaces. Python is easy to learn: even users with no prior programming experience can master Python within weeks.
Finally Python is free to use because of its OSI-approved open source license.

However, even though Python is similar to **Matlab**, it is not the same. Therefore, we also plan
to provide a Matlab version of Psignifit 3.0 with the first official release. However, we will
not guarantee support for this toolbox in future releases and we encourage users to use the
Python version as this will be up to date.

We also noted that a growing number of statistical toolboxes are designed for the statistics
environment *R* and there might be users that are interested in using a R version of Psignifit.
Similar to the Matlab interface, we provide a basic R version of Psignifit 3.0. Again, we do not
guarantee support for this R library. A very rudimentary R library can be found in the folder 'rpsignifit'. Be warned that this is work in progress.


We would be glad to find developers that are interested in supporting these non-Python interfaces
to the Psignifit engine.

.. raw :: html

    <div class="admonition-see-also admonition seealso">
    <p class="first admonition-title">Important</p>
    <p class="last">
    Psignifit3 is beta software. This means that it is still under heavy development. Occasionally
    it might not work as expected. This might have two reasons:
    either, the documentation was ambiguous, or you have discovered a programming error (bug).
    In any case, you would help us a lot if you write an email to our mailing list (see below)
    or <a href="mailto:igordertigor@users.sourceforge.net,valentin-haenel@users.sourceforge.net?subject=[psignifit]">personally to us</a>.
    Typically we can solve your problem within hours.
    </p>
    </div>


****************
Getting in touch
****************

To contact the authors and current maintainers please use:

    Psignifit-users@lists.sourceforge.net


This list can be used to ask questions about usage and installation, report
bugs, and request new features. If you use Psignifit we recommend you
`subscribe <https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/psignifit-users>`_
to this list.

************************
Authors and Contributors
************************

Authors & Contributors¶

The Psignifit3 core development team currently consists of:

* Ingo Fründ
* Valentin Haenel

We are very grateful to the following people, who have contributed to Psignifit3:

* Simon Barthelmé
* Hannah Dold
* Sophie Herbst 
* Jeremy Hill
* Marianne Maertens 
* Manuel Spitschan 
* Felix Wichmann 
* Katharina Maria Zeiner 
* Tiziano Zito 

**************
How to install
**************

Download the current version of Psignifit from:

    `<http://sourceforge.net/projects/psignifit/>`_

In the following, installation instructions are provided for different operating systems. You can find a detailed listing of :doc:`INSTALL_REQUIRED_PACKAGES` at the end of this document, but the dependencies are also considered in the following sections:

* :doc:`INSTALL_LINUX`
* :doc:`INSTALL_MAC`
* :doc:`INSTALL_WINDOWS`
* :doc:`INSTALL_WITHOUT`

Currently this documentation only describes the installation of the Python version of Psignifit. 

If you are looking for installation instructions for Matlab, see :doc:`INSTALL_MATLAB`. Installation instructions for R are going to follow as soon as these toolboxes are
ready for use. 
Unless you are an expert user, or want to use the Matlab version mpsignifit, you do not need to install the optional commandline interface, which is however required for the Matlab version mpsignifit. 

The C++ core of Psignifit does the real work. It is completely coded in C++ and does not require any
additional libraries installed.

For additional information about the structure of the code, the build system and
version control, see: :doc:`CONTRIBUTING`