Matt and Scott: On Thu, 25 Aug 2005, Matt Newville wrote:
This is important for QEXAFS (which typically does sample at a very fine energy grid). I've been told by people doing QEXAFS that a simple box-car average is good enough for binnning QEXAFS data. That's what Ifeffit's rebin() function does. I'd think that a more sophisticated rolling average (convolution) would be better (and not screw up energy resolution), but apparantly it's not an issue.
I have ben playing with the athena smoothing and rebinning funcionalities and I think that I prefer the rebinning because smoothing tends to attenuate sharp peaked structure. A rolling average might be good too but I haven't tried it too much. My guess is that for gentle features such as in the EXAFS region, rebinning, rolling averages and smoothing will all give statistically indistiguishable results. I amy be wrong. Carlo -- Carlo U. Segre -- Professor of Physics Associate Dean for Special Projects, Graduate College Illinois Institute of Technology Voice: 312.567.3498 Fax: 312.567.3494 Carlo.Segre@iit.edu http://www.iit.edu/~segre