A pma Non-Computing Example

Here is a trivial and indeed ridiculously contrived example of how pma could be used to analyze data with arbitrary metrics - as long as it's in the correct format.

The example data being analyzed is how many "pollinators" (honeybees, butterflies, birds and bumblebees) are observed to pollinate flowers in two observation zones (north and south) under particular weather conditions during the time intervals of the observations. The weather metrics are temp_C, press_kPa, rain_mm, windspeed_kmph and winddir_deg).

Pollinators data file

Note that the data sets have a count of 4 and an interval of 900s (4 x 900s = 3600s, which is 1 hour), so the timestamps (DATE stanzas) occur once every hour.

Using pma to create its own configuration file

Note that pma issues a suitable warning.

Here is the configuration file pma generated (with the -p and -d options). Note that all lines are comments.

Here is the configuration file after manual modification with a text editor:

Note: a metric's data values are scaled by fullscale divided by that metric's maxscale. In this case, fullscale and all maxscale values are 100, so all data values are all "scaled" by 1!

Run pma to generate a single output "csv" (bar separated) file

Display the same data in a different timezone

Note: This could have also been done by setting the TZ parameter in the configuration file.

Run pma to generate multiple output files in a specified directory

pma -c pollinators.config -m Multiple_File_Directory pollinators.data

(Output not shown.)