NiceShot!

An interactive dashboard for exploring tokamak plasma shot data. Point it at a shot-statistics file and get an instant browser UI for slicing, visualising, and comparing shots.

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Features

• Projection — UMAP or PCA scatter of every shot, coloured by any column. Backed by a content-hash cache so reloads are instant.
• Pairwise scatter — any two numeric columns plotted against each other, with linear/log axis toggles.
• Correlation — interactive Pearson correlation heatmap for any selection of numeric columns.
• Data table — sortable, virtualized table with shot-ID search, cross-highlight with scatter plots, and CSV export.
• Time traces — per-shot signal plots loaded on click. Supports local parquet/CSV files, live UDA, live SAL, and FAIR MAST (Zarr/netCDF, local or remote) backends.
• Filters — up to 6 simultaneous column filters combinable with AND / OR logic. All plots update live.
• Clustering — run K-Means, DBSCAN, or Agglomerative clustering on any set of numeric columns. Results colour the scatter plots immediately; clusters can be given human-readable class names.
• Cluster centroid traces — mean time-series per cluster, computed automatically after clustering and relabelled live as class names change.
• Outlier detection — flag anomalous shots with Isolation Forest or Local Outlier Factor. Outliers are highlighted in red on the scatter plots and sample traces are loaded automatically.
• CSV export — download the full data table with cluster_id, cluster_name columns appended when clustering has been run.
• SHAP decision plots — per-shot feature attribution rendered inline (optional, requires --shap-data).
• Reference graph — overlay the full reference-shot lineage on any scatter plot (optional, requires reference_shot_col in config).
• Semantic search — find shots similar to a selected one via nearest-neighbour search in feature space. Results are highlighted on the scatter plots with gold ring markers.
• Long-format files — point NiceShot at a table with one row per (shot, variable) and pick the variable from a header dropdown. Only the selected variable's rows are read, and the projection is computed for that variable alone.
• Extensible backends — add support for new data sources (MDSplus, HDF5, custom APIs, …) by subclassing TraceBackend or ShotDataBackend and registering via plugins: in config.

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Requirements

Python ≥ 3.12

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Install

pip install nice-shot
pip install "nice-shot[shap]"       # + SHAP plots, xarray, matplotlib

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Run

nice-shot path/to/shot_stats.parquet

SHOT_DATA is the only required argument — everything else has a default. Open http://localhost:8050 in a browser.

By default nice-shot runs under gunicorn with 4 worker processes, which supports multiple concurrent users. On first run, UMAP/PCA is computed in the master process and cached; subsequent starts are instant.

For local development with hot-reload use --debug:

nice-shot path/to/shot_stats.parquet --debug

Common flags

Flag	Default	Description
SHOT_DATA	— (required)	Shot statistics file (.csv or .parquet)
--config PATH	nice_shot/config.yaml	YAML config file
--data-dir PATH	data/mastu/	Directory of per-shot files (parquet backend)
--projection PATH	—	Pre-computed 2-D embedding; skips UMAP/PCA entirely
--shap-data PATH	—	SHAP values NetCDF (.nc); enables the SHAP tab
--workers N	4	Gunicorn worker processes (ignored in --debug mode)
--port PORT	8050	Port to listen on
--debug	off	Use the single-process Flask dev server instead of gunicorn

Config-backed flags

Every option in nice_shot/config.yaml also has a CLI flag of the same name. An explicit CLI flag overrides the config file, which overrides the built-in default:

Flag	Config field
--backend NAME	backend
--signals SIGNAL [SIGNAL ...]	signals
--min-time SECONDS	time_window.min_time
--max-time SECONDS	time_window.max_time
--timebase-hz HZ	uda.timebase_hz
--projection-method {umap,pca}	projection_method
--variable-column NAME	variable_column
--umap-features COLUMN [COLUMN ...]	umap_features
--umap-exclude-features COLUMN [COLUMN ...]	umap_exclude_features
--reference-shot-col NAME	reference_shot_col
--plugins MODULE [MODULE ...]	plugins
--backend-option KEY=VALUE (repeatable)	backend_options (merged per-key)

Run nice-shot --help for full descriptions.

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Configuration

Edit nice_shot/config.yaml (or pass --config to point elsewhere):

backend: parquet        # parquet | uda | sal

signals:                # columns shown in the time-trace panel
  - ip
  - ne
  - dalpha

time_window:
  min_time: 0.0
  max_time: 1.0

projection_method: umap # umap | pca

umap_features:          # omit to use all numeric columns
  - ip_max
  - ne_max
  - bt_max

reference_shot_col: reference__number   # omit to hide the feature

Any of these can be overridden for a single run with the matching CLI flag — see Config-backed flags above.

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Data

Shot statistics file (SHOT_DATA) — a flat .parquet or .csv with one row per shot. The shot ID column is detected automatically (shot_id, shot, pulse, number, …).

Per-shot traces (--data-dir) — one .parquet or .csv per shot, laid out as:

<data-dir>/<any-subdir>/<shot_id>.parquet

Each file needs a time column and one column per configured signal.

Pre-computed projection (--projection) — a .npy (shape (n,2) or (n,3)), .csv, or .parquet with shot ID and two coordinate columns.

SHAP values (--shap-data) — an xarray NetCDF file with shot_id and feature dimensions.

See docs/data-formats.md for full schema details.

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Docs

uv run --dev zensical serve

Opens the full documentation at http://localhost:8000.