AMEP: The active matter evaluation package for Python

The Active Matter Evaluation Package (AMEP) is a Python library for analyzing simulation data of particle-based and continuum simulations. It provides a powerful and simple interface for handling large data sets and for calculating and visualizing a broad variety of observables that are relevant to active matter systems. Examples range from the mean-square displacement and the structure factor to cluster-size distributions, binder cumulants, and growth exponents. AMEP is written in pure Python and is based on powerful libraries such as NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, and scikit-image. Computationally expensive methods are parallelized and optimized to run efficiently on workstations, laptops, and high-performance computing architectures, and an HDF5-based data format is used in the backend to store and handle simulation data as well as analysis results. AMEP provides the first comprehensive framework for analyzing simulation results of both particle-based and continuum simulations (as well as experimental data) of active matter systems. In particular, AMEP also allows it to analyze simulations that combine particle-based and continuum techniques such as used to study the motion of bacteria in chemical fields or for modeling particle motion in a flow field for example.