The Void IDentification and Examination toolkit (VIDE) identifies voids using a modified version of the parameter-free void finder ZOBOV (ascl:1304.005); a Voronoi tessellation of the tracer particles is used to estimate the density field followed by a watershed algorithm to group Voronoi cells into zones and subsequently voids. Output is a summary of void properties in plain ASCII; a Python API is provided for analysis tasks, including loading and manipulating void catalogs and particle members, filtering, plotting, computing clustering statistics, stacking, comparing catalogs, and fitting density profiles.

This software trains artificial neural networks to find non-linear functionals of data that maximize Fisher information: information maximizing neural networks (IMNNs). As compressing large data sets vastly simplifies both frequentist and Bayesian inference, important information may be inadvertently missed. Likelihood-free inference based on automatically derived IMNN summaries produces summaries that are good approximations to sufficient statistics. IMNNs are robustly capable of automatically finding optimal, non-linear summaries of the data even in cases where linear compression fails: inferring the variance of Gaussian signal in the presence of noise, inferring cosmological parameters from mock simulations of the Lyman-α forest in quasar spectra, and inferring frequency-domain parameters from LISA-like detections of gravitational waveforms. In this final case, the IMNN summary outperforms linear data compression by avoiding the introduction of spurious likelihood maxima.