The AstroStat Slog

From arxiv/astro-ph:0709.1144v1:
Cosmic Microwave Background Statistics for a Direction-Dependent Primordial Power Spectrum by A. R. Pullen and M. Kamionkowski

The authors developed cosmic microwave background statistics for a primordial power spectrum, motivated from the needs of testing the cosmological common assumption, i.e. the statistical isotropy of primordial perturbations. This statistics is for a primordial power spectrum, depending on the direction and the magnitude of the Fourier wavevector. Statistically speaking, the most interesting part is their construction of the minimum-variance estimators for the coefficients of a spherical-harmonic expansion of the direction-dependence of the primordial power spectrum.

From arxiv/astro-ph:0708.1208v1:
The measurement errors in the Swift-UVOT and XMM-OM by N.P.M. Kuin and S.R. Rosen

The probability distribution of photon counts from the Optical Monitor on XMM Newton satellite (XMM-OM) and the UVOT on the Swift satellite follows a binomial distribution due to detector characteristics. Incident count rate was derived as a function of the measured count rate, which was shown to follow a binomial distribution.
Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] Swift and XMM measurement errors, Sep. 8, 2007’ »

From arxiv/math.st: 0708.0499v1
Inference for mixtures of symmetric distributions by Hunter, Wang, and Hettmansperger, Annals of Statistics, 2007, Vol.35(1), pp.224-251.
Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] Identifiability and mixtures of distributions, Aug. 3, 2007’ »

Ah..Sky in Google Earth made an arxiv appearance [arxiv/astro-ph:0709.0752], Sky in Google Earth: The Next Frontier in Astronomical Data Discovery and Visualization by R. Scranton et al.

I once talked about the relationship between astronomers and statisticians in the slog posting Data Doctors. To astronomers, statisticians are assistants. Statisticians are just helping astronomical data analysis with statistically limited eyes. Less frequently statistical improvements and modification occurred in the astronomical society through collaborations with statisticians compared to other fields.
Continue reading ‘Arrogant?’ »

From arxiv/astro-ph:0708.4030v1
Deep ACS Imaging in the Globular Cluster NGC 6397: The Cluster Color Magnitude Diagram and Luminosity Function by H.B. Richer et.al

This paper presented an observational study of a globular cluster, named NGC 6397, enhanced and more informative compared to previous observations in a sense that 1) a truncation in the white dwarf cooling sequence occurs at 28 magnitude, 2) the cluster main sequence seems to terminate approximately at the hydrogen-burning limit predicted by two independent stellar evolution models, and 3) luminosity functions (LFs) or mass functions (MFs) are well defined. Nothing statistical, but the idea of defining color magnitude diagrams (CMDs) and LFs described in the paper, will assist developing suitable statistics on CMD and LF fitting problems in addition to the improved measurements (ACS imaging) of stars in NGC 6397.
Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] NGC 6397 Deep ACS Imaging, Aug. 29, 2007’ »

From arxiv/astro-ph:0708.4274v1
Comparison of decision tree methods for finding active objects by Y. Zhao and Y. Zhang

The authors (astronomers) introduced and summarized various decision three methods (REPTree, Random Tree, Decision Stump, Random Forest, J48, NBTree, and AdTree) to the astronomical community.
Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] Decision Tree, Aug. 31, 2007’ »

From arxiv/astro-ph:0708.3758v1
Numerical Color-Magnitude Diagram Analysis of SDSS Data and Application to the New Milky Way Satellites by J. T. A. de Jong et. al.

The authors applied MATCH (Dolphin, 2002^[1] -note that the year is corrected) to M13, M15, M92, NGC2419, NGC6229, and Pal14 (well known globular clusters), and BooI, BooII, CvnI, CVnII, Com, Her, LeoIV, LeoT, Segu1, UMaI, UMaII and Wil1 (newly discovered Milky Way satellites) from Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to fit Color Magnitude diagrams (CMDs) of these stellar clusters and find the properties of these satellites.
Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] Numerical CMD analysis, Aug. 28th, 2007’ »

1. Numerical methods of star formation history measurement and applications to seven dwarf spheroidals,Dolphin (2002), MNRAS, 332, p. 91[↩]

From arxiv/astro-ph:0708.1204v3
An Isochrone Database and a Rapid Model for Stellar Population Synthesis by Li and Han

This paper emphasize the binary population: CMD fitting with the binary population synthetic model outperformed to the single population model. They used Hurley code (Hurley, Tout, and Pols (2002). Evolution of binary stars and the effect of tides on binary populations, MNRAS, 329(4), p.897-928). They mentioned that two color-color grids can disentangle the age-metallicity degeneracy via binary stellar populations. They fitted their isochrone database to M67 and NGC 1868 with the gT-grid and concluded that the database of binary stellar populations fitted the color magnitude diagrams better.
Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] Isochrone database, Aug. 20, 2007’ »

One of the most frequently cited papers in model selection would be An Asymptotic Equivalence of Choice of Model by Cross-Validation and Akaike’s Criterion by M. Stone, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological), Vol. 39, No. 1 (1977), pp. 44-47.
(Akaike’s 1974 paper, introducing Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), is the most often cited paper in the subject of model selection).
Continue reading ‘Cross-validation for model selection’ »

From arxiv/math.st:0708.0169v1
Data-Driven Goodness-of-Fit Tests by L. Mikhail

Goodness-of-Fit tests have been essential in astronomy to validate the chosen physical model to observed data whereas the limits of these tests have not been taken into consideration carefully when observed data were put into the model for estimating the model parameters. Therefore, I thought this paper would be helpful to have a thought on the different point of views between the astronomers’ practice of goodness-of-fit tests and the statisticians’ constructing tests. (Warning: the paper is abstract and theoretical.)
Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] Data-Driven Goodness-of-Fit Tests, Aug. 1, 2007’ »

From arxiv/math.st:0708.2153v1
Estimating the number of classes by Mao and Lindsay

This study could be linked to identifying the number of lines from Poisson nature x-ray count data, one of the key interests for astronomers. However, as pointed by the authors, estimating the numbers of classes is a difficult statistical problem. I.J.Good^[1] said that

I don’t believe it is usually possible to estimate the number of species, but only an appropriate lower bound to that number. This is because there is nearly always a good chance that there are a very large number of extremely rare species.

Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] Poisson Mixture, Aug. 16, 2007’ »

1. courtesy of the paper: Estimating the number of species: A review by Bunge and Fitzpatrick (1993), JASA, 88, 364-373.[↩]

From arxiv/astro-ph:0705.3856
Gamma-ray albedo of the moon by Moskalenko and Porter

The title sounds very interesting although the significance of albedo spectra is not recognized by a statistician. This study was performed to utilize GLAST and PAMELA via Monte Carlo simulations (the toolkit for MC was GEANT 8.2) with EGRET data.

I’ve been heard so much, without knowing fundamental reasons (most likely physics), about coverage problems from astrostat/phystat groups. This paper might be an interest for those: Interval Estimation in Exponential Families by Brown, Cai,and DasGupta ; Statistica Sinica (2003), 13, pp. 19-49

Abstract summary:
The authors investigated issues in interval estimation of the mean in the exponential family, such as binomial, Poisson, negative binomial, normal, gamma, and a sixth distribution. The poor performance of the Wald interval has been known not only for discrete cases but for nonnormal continuous cases with significant negative bias. Their computation suggested that the equal tailed Jeffreys interval and the likelihood ratio interval are the best alternatives to the Wald interval. Continue reading ‘Coverage issues in exponential families’ »

During the International X-ray Summer School, as a project presentation, I tried to explain the inadequate practice of о‡^2 statistics in astronomy. If your best fit is biased (any misidentification of a model easily causes such bias), do not use о‡^2 statistics to get 1оѓ error for the 68% chance of capturing the true parameter.

Later, I decided to do further investigation on that subject and this paper came along: Astrostatistics: Goodness-of-Fit and All That! by Babu and Feigelson.
Continue reading ‘Astrostatistics: Goodness-of-Fit and All That!’ »