TrajPy: empowering feature engineering for trajectory analysis across domains

Abstract

Motivation: Trajectories, which are sequentially measured quantities that form a path, are an important presence in many different fields, from hadronic beams in physics to electrocardiograms in medicine. Trajectory analysis requires the quantification and classification of curves, either by using statistical descriptors or physics-based features. To date, no extensive and user-friendly package for trajectory analysis has been readily available, despite its importance and potential application across various domains. Results: We have developed TrajPy, a free, open-source Python package that serves as a complementary tool for empowering trajectory analysis. This package features a user-friendly graphical user interface and offers a set of physical descriptors that aid in characterizing these complex structures. TrajPy has already been successfully applied to studies of mitochondrial motility in neuroblastoma cell lines and the analysis of in silico models for cell migration, in combination with image analysis. Availability and implementation: The TrajPy package is developed in Python 3 and is released under the GNU GPL-3.0 license. It can easily be installed via PyPi, and the development source code is accessible at the repository: https://github.com/ocbe-uio/TrajPy/. The package release is also automatically archived with the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.3656044.