Posts tagged ‘optimization’

On-line Machine Learning Lectures and Notes

I found this website a while ago but haven’t checked until now. They are quite useful by its contents (even pages of the lecture notes are properly flipped for you while the lecture is given). Increasing popularity of machine learning among astronomers will find more use of such lectures. If you have time to learn machine learning and other related subjects, please visit http://videolectures.net/. Specifically classified links to interesting subjects are found by your click. Continue reading ‘On-line Machine Learning Lectures and Notes’ »

What is so special about chi square in astronomy?

Since I start reading arxiv/astro-ph abstracts and a few relevant papers about a month ago, so often I see chi-square something as an optimization or statistical inference tool. Chi-square function, chi-square statistics, chi-square goodness-of-fit test are the words that serve different data analysis purposes but under the same prefix. As a newbie to statistics, although I learned chi-square distribution and chi-square test, doing statistics with chi-square are somewhat considered to be obsolete in terms of robust applications to modern data. These are introduced as one of many distributions and statistical tests. Nothing special. However, in astronomy, chi-square becomes the almost only method for statistical data analysis. I wonder how such strong bond between chi-square tactics and astronomer’s keen mind to data analysis has happened?
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