Posts tagged ‘David Garcia-Alvarez’

Dance of the Errors

One of the big problems that has come up in recent years is in how to represent the uncertainty in certain estimates. Astronomers usually present errors as +-stddev on the quantities of interest, but that presupposes that the errors are uncorrelated. But suppose you are estimating a multi-dimensional set of parameters that may have large correlations amongst themselves? One such case is that of Differential Emission Measures (DEM), where the “quantity of emission” from a plasma (loosely, how much stuff there is available to emit — it is the product of the volume and the densities of electrons and H) is estimated for different temperatures. See the plots at the PoA DEM tutorial for examples of how we are currently trying to visualize the error bars. Another example is the correlated systematic uncertainties in effective areas (Drake et al., 2005, Chandra Cal Workshop). This is not dissimilar to the problem of determining the significance of a “feature” in an image (Connors, A. & van Dyk, D.A., 2007, SCMA IV). Continue reading ‘Dance of the Errors’ »