Posts tagged ‘chi-square minimization’

a century ago

Almost 100 years ago, A.S. Eddington stated in his book Stellar Movements (1914) that

…in calculating the mean error of a series of observations it is preferable to use the simple mean residual irrespective of sign rather than the mean square residual

Such eminent astronomer said already least absolute deviation over chi-square, if I match simple mean residual and mean square residual to relevant methodologies, in order. Continue reading ‘a century ago’ »

4754 d.f.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw 4754 degrees of freedom (d.f.) and chi-square test statistic 4859. I’ve often enough seen large degrees of freedom from journals in astronomy, several hundreds to a few thousands, but I never felt comfortable at these big numbers. Then with a great shock 4754 d.f. appeared. I must find out why I feel so bothered at these huge degrees of freedom. Continue reading ‘4754 d.f.’ »

[ArXiv] Particle Physics

[stat.AP:0811.1663]
Open Statistical Issues in Particle Physics by Louis Lyons

My recollection of meeting Prof. L. Lyons was that he is very kind and listening. I was delighted to see his introductory article about particle physics and its statistical challenges from an [arxiv:stat] email subscription. Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] Particle Physics’ »

[ArXiv] Spectroscopic Survey, June 29, 2007

From arXiv/astro-ph:0706.4484

Spectroscopic Surveys: Present by Yip. C. overviews recent spectroscopic sky surveys and spectral analysis techniques toward Virtual Observatories (VO). In addition that spectroscopic redshift measures increase like Moore’s law, the surveys tend to go deeper and aim completeness. Mainly elliptical galaxy formation has been studied due to more abundance compared to spirals and the galactic bimodality in color-color or color-magnitude diagrams is the result of the gas-rich mergers by blue mergers forming the red sequence. Principal component analysis has incorporated ratios of emission line-strengths for classifying Type-II AGN and star forming galaxies. Lyα identifies high z quasars and other spectral patterns over z reveal the history of the early universe and the characteristics of quasars. Also, the recent discovery of 10 satellites to the Milky Way is mentioned.
Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] Spectroscopic Survey, June 29, 2007’ »