Guidelines for New Analysis Scripts

Tips for writing new analysis scripts (for the GUI and to interact with other functions)

• To work with the GUI, an analysis script must take the following arguments: dirlist/stats, ax. dirlist is a struct representation of a list of directories. stats is a single structure - and the script should work without assuming that stats is a single day's stats. ax is a handle to an axes - the script can generate its own axes if ax is empty. Combineflag is a 1/0 indicator of whether multiple days should be selected. It is optional, but the gui supports it.
• Limit the script to one axes unless multiple axes are unavoidable (like trajectory_analysis). If the script generates multiple plots, but ones that are not inherently linked (like activity_summary_heat_maps), break the function into modular pieces that can be called individually.
• If the above requirement seems arbitrary, consider splitting up data generation/analysis and plotting. See the interactions for activity/velocity/acceleration heat maps to explain this better.

How to add an analysis function to pp_gui.

The following three functions must be changed in order for pp_gui to support the new script: plot_all_days, load_arguments, populate_function_list. However, each of these only requires a few lines. populate_function_list simply generates the list of functions/options to select from the drop down menus. load_arguments prepares the appropriate argument slots in the window.

1. populate_function_list: add a string title for the plot to the cell array function_list EX: 'Acceleration Heat 'Acceleration Variation Heat'; 'My New Function'; 'Angle Distribution (Linear)';

2. load_arguments: add an elseif block for the response when the function is selected. It is important that the text in the elseif block exactly matches the entered string in populate_function_list.