acabaniss / py-households

Pythonic ABM for household demography in the Mediterranean

house-inheritance

Pythonic ABM for household demography. Actively under development.

by Andrew Cabaniss

[email protected] | @andrewcabaniss | http://www.andrewcabaniss.com

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This project is an ABM (agent-based model) for examining household inheritance and demography in the ancient Mediterranean. Individuals residing within houses are modeled to explore the effects of birth and death rates alongside marriage locality, household fragmentation, and inheritance rules on houses and households. The goal is to eventually provide an easily-adaptable model to control for demographic processes in the analysis of household assemblages and characteristics.

This project is written in python 3. While originally constructed for Prof. Lynette Shaw's graduate course on computational modeling, I am now adapting it for more general use with the help of two Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) students through the University of Michigan.

Everything here is under active development. Please contact me (Andrew) through one of the links above if you are looking for a more immediate use of the package.

Contents:

Code: Contains the households python package, currently under development. The overall structure and many individual modules work as-is. Examples and tests are also included or being developed.

Data: Contains data to be used in launching, calibrating, or checking the model.

Doc: Contains the Model Proposal for the original course this project began under (CMPLXSYS 530).

Dev: Contains code currently being developed.

py-households's Issues

Rules are part of individuals, not communities

Behavior is currently carried out by communities, but ultimately it is individuals and households who enact these behaviors. Person objects need to have these behaviors personally, and have learning/transmission rules.

From the to do list:
Inheritance, locality, fragmentation (And later other rules) need to be conducted by individuals, and be inherited or learned, with those methods of inheritance/learning also definable (and inherited/learned themselves.)

Implement World as a container of communities

This means that world progresses teh simulation and has a way of accessing all people, randomizing the order, and carrying out the events of the year.

History tracking

All properties should be defined for Person, House, Community, and Worljd classes and include a log in a Diary object as part of the set_ function. Diaries can be part of main or narrative, whatever helps you sleep at night.

Birth rules

Birth is currently not customizable beyond rate. Sex ratio needs to be a variable as well.

Value checks for agetables, rules

When a specific class is required as input, make sure that the input is of the correct type, and provide an error message. #5 will make this easier.

Correct class conventions

Currently, class names are not correctly formatted following PEP 8. See also.

Alternate household definitions

The current household definitions are very limited, and other formats need to be provided for extensively as well. Turn residency into a subpackage, and from there expand out into other definitions. Du and Kamakura 2006, for example.

Create classes for behavior

The behavior subpackage is missing class definitions, which would make it easier to verify that they each inheritance rule, fragmentation rule, etc. actually do what they should and fit into the rest of the simulation.