ESTEC Astrostatistics Workshop 2015

    9 - 12 March 2015; ESTEC

    Lecturer: Prof. Eric Feigelson (Penn State University)

    Organising committee: Carlo Manara, Jos de Bruijne, Teresa Antoja, Jacopo Chevallard, Stefanie Raetz

    The slides and R codes of the workshop are available at http://www2.astro.psu.edu/users/edf/ESTEC_2015/

    Programme

    Monday, 9 March 2015 (Ba030)
    13:30 - 14:30: Introduction to astrostatistics (Lecture, 1h)
    • History, current & future status, perspectives on statistics for astronomy
    14:30 - 16:30: Introduction to R (Brief lecture & tutorial, 2h)
    • History, structure, syntax, performance of R and the CRAN add-on packages

     

    Tuesday, 10 March 2015 (Df121)
    13:30 - 15:00: Density estimation & local regression (Brief lecture & R/CRAN tutorial, 1.5h)
    • Histograms, kernel density estimation, local regression methods including Gaussian processes regression
    15:00 - 16:30: Inference methods and regression (Brief lecture & R tutorial, 1.5h)
    • Least squares & maximum likelihood, measurement errors, linear & nonlinear regression, residual analysis

     

    Wednesday, 11 March 2015 (Ba030)
    13:30 - 15:30: Multivariate analysis, clustering & classification (Brief lecture & R/CRAN tutorial, 2h)
    • Principal component analysis, unsupervised clustering, supervised classification
    15:30 - 16:30: Nondetections (Brief lecture & R/CRAN tutorial, 1h)
    • Censoring, survival analysis, truncation

     

    Thursday, 12 March 2015 (Ba030)
    13:30 - 15:30: Bayesian inference (Lecture, 2h)
    • Concepts, Bayes Theorem, priors & posteriors, MCMC calculations, comparison with classical methods
    15:30 - 16:30: Good statistical practices for astronomy (Lecture, 1h)
    • Critique of poor practices and recommendations for improvements

    ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

    Prof. Feigelson is available at other hours for statistical consultation on research topics.