Weaving together Astronomy+Statistics+Computer Science+Engineering+Intrumentation, far beyond the growing borders
Archive for the ‘Jargon’ Category.
It seems to be necessary to devise a good system of categories beforehand with wordpress, because plain tags are not (yet?) implemented. Categories can only be defined by the admin, so it is useful to have as comprehensive a list as possible. I suggest the following set:
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Sometime early this year, Jeremy Drake asked this innocuous sounding question in the context of determining the bounds on the amplitude of an absorption line: Is the 3sigma error bar the same length as 3 times the 1sigma error bar?
In other words, if he measured the 99.7% confidence range for his model parameter, would it always be thrice as large as the nominal 1sigma confidence range? The answer is complicated, and depends on who you ask: Frequentists will say “yes, of course!”, Likelihoodists will say “Maybe, yeah, er, depends”, and Bayesians will say “sigma? what’s that?” So I think it would be useful to expound a bit more on this to astronomers, whose mental processes are generally Bayesian but whose computational tools are mostly Frequentist.
Continue reading ‘Is 3sigma the same as 3*1sigma?’ »
The Statistics Jargon for Astronomers has revived (Jan. 2007) but now, it is barely breathing. Effortlessly search engines and Internet encyclopedia provide details on statistical terminologies for astronomers, which cast the largest difficulty on this jargon website. We urge both astronomers and statisticians’ contributions for compiling this lexicon and their discussions on both subjects.