a Cooler with non integer "counts"

[thekswenson]

Hello,

Is it possible to store non-integer counts?
It looks like the Cooler design may only allow weights to be stored for bins, which allow for non-integer values when they are multiplied by the counts, but I'd like to store floats directly in the matrix.

I have good reasons to do this, as I do statistical tests that compare to a null hypothesis requiring a "randomized" matrix: I need to do this randomization on the normalized matrices.

Thanks.
(I didn't find a link to a mailing list, so I've posted the question here)

[nvictus]

You can definitely store non-integer counts.

• API: in create_cooler, you can specify a dtype for the "count" field with dtype={"count": float}
• CLI: in cooler load and cooler cload, there is a --field option that does something similar, and the former also has a shortcut flag --count-as-float

[thekswenson]

Great... thank you!