Contributing
Usage & Attribution
We would love to hear about how you use affinis!
Citation
If you use affinis in your work, please cite the following record:
@misc{dataset_key,
author = {Sexton, Rachael T.},
title = {Affinis},
subtitle = {tools for inferring relations from co-occurrence data}
year = {2026},
publisher = {National Institute of Standards and Technology},
doi = {10.18434/mds2-4107},
howpublished = {\url{https://doi.org/10.18434/mds2-4107}}
}
Sexton, Rachael T (2026), Affinis: tools for inferring relations from co-occurrence data, National Institute of Standards and Technology, https://doi.org/10.18434/mds2-4107
Disclaimer
You are free to use affinis in your tools and research!
Affinis and all of it's associated documentation are in the public domain.
NIST Disclaimer
NIST-developed software is provided by NIST as a public service. You may use, copy, and distribute copies of the software in any medium, provided that you keep intact this entire notice. You may improve, modify, and create derivative works of the software or any portion of the software, and you may copy and distribute such modifications or works. Modified works should carry a notice stating that you changed the software and should note the date and nature of any such change. Please explicitly acknowledge the National Institute of Standards and Technology as the source of the software.
NIST-developed software is expressly provided "AS IS." NIST MAKES NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, IN FACT, OR ARISING BY OPERATION OF LAW, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND DATA ACCURACY. NIST NEITHER REPRESENTS NOR WARRANTS THAT THE OPERATION OF THE SOFTWARE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE, OR THAT ANY DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED. NIST DOES NOT WARRANT OR MAKE ANY REPRESENTATIONS REGARDING THE USE OF THE SOFTWARE OR THE RESULTS THEREOF, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE CORRECTNESS, ACCURACY, RELIABILITY, OR USEFULNESS OF THE SOFTWARE.
You are solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using and distributing the software and you assume all risks associated with its use, including but not limited to the risks and costs of program errors, compliance with applicable laws, damage to or loss of data, programs or equipment, and the unavailability or interruption of operation. This software is not intended to be used in any situation where a failure could cause risk of injury or damage to property. The software developed by NIST employees is not subject to copyright protection within the United States.
For Developers
If you would like to contribute to affinis, please fork the repository and open a pull-request.
Dependency & Environment Setup
We use a number of developer tools, but the primary prerequisite to get started is poetry, which we have used to manage virtual environments and track dependencies.
Once you have poetry installed, clone this repository and run poetry install in the top level directory.
This will install the necessary development dependencies, like jupytext, zensical, pytest, and hypothesis.
Project Structure
.
├── affinis # Source for library
├── docs # Source for documentation
│ ├── api
│ ├── case-studies
│ ├── css
│ ├── images
│ ├── javascripts
│ └── user-guide
├── notebooks # Jupyter notebook source for tutorials
│ ├── case-studies
│ └── user-guide
└── tests # Unit tests (pytest+hypothesis)
Unit Tests
Tests should be added to the tests/ directory n a per-module basis.
For instance, for the associations.py module, tests/test_associations.py.
To run unit tests during development, use this command to perform the property-based tests we have built for this library.