easyaccess facilitates access to astronomical catalogs stored in SQL Databases. It is an enhanced command line interpreter and provides a custom interface with custom commands and was specifically designed to access data from the Dark Energy Survey Oracle database, including autocompletion of tables, columns, users and commands, simple ways to upload and download tables using csv, fits and HDF5 formats, iterators, search and description of tables among others. It can easily be extended to other surveys or SQL databases. The package is written in Python and supports customized addition of commands and functionalities.

Vizic is a Python visualization library that builds the connection between images and catalogs through an interactive map of the sky region. The software visualizes catalog data over a custom background canvas using the shape, size and orientation of each object in the catalog and displays interactive and customizable objects in the map. Property values such as redshift and magnitude can be used to filter or apply colormaps, and objects can be selected for further analysis through standard Python functions from inside a Jupyter notebook.

Vizic allows custom overlays to be appended dynamically on top of the sky map; included are Voronoi, Delaunay, Minimum Spanning Tree and HEALPix layers, which are helpful for visualizing large-scale structure. Overlays can be generated, added or removed dynamically with one line of code. Catalog data is kept in a non-relational database. The Jupyter Notebook allows the user to create scripts to analyze and plot the data selected/displayed in the interactive map, making Vizic a powerful and flexible interactive analysis tool. Vizic be used for data inspection, clustering analysis, galaxy alignment studies, outlier identification or simply large-scale visualizations.

SparsePZ uses sparse basis representation to fully represent individual photometric redshift probability density functions (PDFs). This approach requires approximately half the parameters for the same multi-Gaussian fitting accuracy, and has the additional advantage that an entire PDF can be stored by using a 4-byte integer per basis function. Only 10-20 points per galaxy are needed to reconstruct both the individual PDFs and the ensemble redshift distribution, N(z), to an accuracy of 99.9 per cent when compared to the one built using the original PDFs computed with a resolution of δz = 0.01, reducing the required storage of 200 original values by a factor of 10-20. This basis representation can be directly extended to a cosmological analysis, thereby increasing computational performance without losing resolution or accuracy.

The parallel Python framework MLZ (Machine Learning and photo-Z) computes fast and robust photometric redshift PDFs using Machine Learning algorithms. It uses a supervised technique with prediction trees and random forest through TPZ that can be used for a regression or a classification problem, or a unsupervised methods with self organizing maps and random atlas called SOMz. These machine learning implementations can be efficiently combined into a more powerful one resulting in robust and accurate probability distributions for photometric redshifts.

TPZ, a parallel code written in python, produces robust and accurate photometric redshift PDFs by using prediction tree and random forests. The code also produces ancillary information about the sample used, such as prior unbiased errors estimations (giving an estimation of performance) and a ranking of importance of variables as well as a map of performance indicating where extra training data is needed to improve overall performance. It is designed to be easy to use and a tutorial is available.