Weaving together Astronomy+Statistics+Computer Science+Engineering+Intrumentation, far beyond the growing borders
Posts tagged ‘CMB’
A number of practical Bayesian data analysis books are available these days. Here, I’d like to introduce two that were relatively recently published. I like the fact that they are rather technical than theoretical. They have practical examples close to be related with astronomical data. They have R codes so that one can try algorithms on the fly instead of jamming probability theories. Continue reading ‘[Books] Bayesian Computations’ »
Kriging is the first thing that one learns from a spatial statistics course. If an astronomer sees its definition and application, almost every astronomer will say, “Oh, I know this! It is like the 2pt correlation function!!” At least this was my first impression when I first met kriging.
There are three distinctive subjects in spatial statistics: geostatistics, lattice data analysis, and spatial point pattern analysis. Because of the resemblance between the spatial distribution of observations in coordinates and the notion of spatially random points, spatial statistics in astronomy has leaned more toward the spatial point pattern analysis than the other subjects. In other fields from immunology to forestry to geology whose data are associated spatial coordinates of underlying geometric structures or whose data were sampled from lattices, observations depend on these spatial structures and scientists enjoy various applications from geostatistics and lattice data analysis. Particularly, kriging is the fundamental notion in geostatistics whose application is found many fields. Continue reading ‘[MADS] Kriging’ »
This is my last [ArXiv] series. Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] 3rd week, June 2008’ »
Despite no statistic related discussion, a paper comparing XSPEC and ISIS, spectral analysis open source applications might bring high energy astrophysicists’ interests this week. Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] 1st week, June 2008’ »
There’s no particular opening remark this week. Only I have profound curiosity about jackknife tests in [astro-ph:0805.1994]. Including this paper, a few deserve separate discussions from a statistical point of view that shall be posted. Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] 2nd week, May 2008’ »
The last paper in the list discusses MCMC for time series analysis, applied to sunspot data. There are six additional papers about statistics and data analysis from the week. Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] 4th week, Apr. 2008’ »
The dichotomy of outliers; detecting outliers to be discarded or to be investigated; statistics that is robust enough not to be influenced by outliers or sensitive enough to alert the anomaly in the data distribution. Although not related, one paper about outliers made me to dwell on what outliers are. This week topics are diverse. Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] 3rd week, Apr. 2008’ »
In this posting, I added lecture notes on cosmic microwave background (CMB) and Gravitas DVD (animation, I believe). There is another paper I must include but I decide to write a short review separately. Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] 4th week, Feb. 2008’ »
Review papers on Bayesian hierarchical modeling and LAR (least angle regression) appeared in this week’s stat arXiv and in addition to interesting astro-ph papers.
A review paper on LASSO and LAR: [stat.ME:0801.0964] T. Hesterberg et.al.
Least Angle and L1 Regression: A Review
Model checking for Bayesian hierarchical modeling: [stat.ME:0802.0743] M. J. Bayarri, M. E. Castellanos
Bayesian Checking of the Second Levels of Hierarchical Models
Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] 1st week, Feb. 2008’ »
It is notable that there’s an astronomy paper contains AIC, BIC, and Bayesian evidence in the title. The topic of the paper, unexceptionally, is cosmology like other astronomy papers discussed these (statistical) information criteria (I only found a couple of papers on model selection applied to astronomical data analysis without articulating CMB stuffs. Note that I exclude Bayes factor for the model selection purpose).
To find the paper or other interesting ones, click Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] 2nd week, Jan. 2007’ »
There’s only one day in the first week of December with no preprint appearance. Dubbing the week of Dec. 2nd as the first week is hoped to be accepted. Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] 1st week, Dec. 2007’ »
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.