Related papers: The Lutz-Kelker Paradox
In 1957, Lindley published "A statistical paradox" in Biometrika, revealing a fundamental conflict between frequentist and Bayesian inference as sample size approaches infinity. We present a new paradox of a different kind: a conflict…
We investigate biases induced by the conversion between the observed image shape to shear distortion in current weak lensing analysis methods. Such overall calibration biases cannot be detected by the standard tests such as E/B…
The Jeffreys-Lindley paradox stands as the most profound divergence between frequentist and Bayesian approaches to hypothesis testing. Yet despite more than six decades of discussion, this paradox remains frequently misunderstood--even in…
We sing the praises of the central limit theorem. Having previously removed all other possible causes of significant systematic error in the statistical parallax determination of RR Lyrae absolute magnitudes, we investigate systematic…
We present a new procedure for photometric parallax estimation. The data for 1236 stars provide calibrations between the absolute magnitude offset from the Hyades main-sequence and the UV-excess for different (B-V)o colour-index intervals,…
The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is frequently used in data science. For discrete distributions on large state spaces, approximations of probability vectors may result in a few small negative entries, rendering the KL divergence…
We describe a novel method to determine direct geometrical distances to quasars that can measure the cosmological constant, Lambda, with minimal assumptions. This method is equivalent to geometric parallax, with the `standard length' being…
We extend the Fourier transform based method for the analysis of galaxy redshift surveys of Feldman, Kaiser & Peacock (1994: FKP) to model luminosity-dependent clustering. In a magnitude limited survey, galaxies at high redshift are more…
We present a method for computing the probability distribution of microlensed light curve derivatives both in the case of a static lens with a transverse velocity, and in the case of microlensing that is produced through stellar proper…
The well-known Bayes theorem assumes that a posterior distribution is a probability distribution. However, the posterior distribution may no longer be a probability distribution if an improper prior distribution (non-probability measure)…
The generalized Kullback-Leibler divergence (K-Ld) in Tsallis statistics [constrained by the additive duality of generalized statistics (dual generalized K-Ld)] is here reconciled with the theory of Bregman divergences for expectations…
A method to calculate the statistical properties of microlensing light curves is developed. The approach follows works by Deguchi & Watson, Seitz & Schneider and Neindorf, attempting to clarify the ideas involved and techniques used in the…
We derive Bayesian distances for all stars in the RV sample of Gaia DR2, and use the statistical method of Schoenrich, Binney & Asplund(2012) to validate the distances and test the Gaia parallaxes. In contrast to other methods, which rely…
The statistical analysis of the lensing effects coupled with the statistical analysis of the number counts is a tool to probe directly the relation between the mass and the light. In particular, some properties of the bias parameter can be…
Discretization of continuous-time diffusion processes is a widely recognized method for sampling. However, it seems to be a considerable restriction when the potentials are often required to be smooth (gradient Lipschitz). This paper…
The star discrepancy $D_N^*(\mathcal{P})$ is a quantitative measure for the irregularity of distribution of a finite point set $\mathcal{P}$ in the multi-dimensional unit cube which is intimately related to the integration error of…
The Blazhko effect is a long term, generally irregular modulation of the light curves that occurs in a sizeable number of RR Lyrae stars. The physical origin of the effect has been a puzzle ever since its discovery over a hundred years ago.…
This paper is concerned with the well known Jeffreys-Lindley paradox. In a Bayesian set up, the so-called paradox arises when a point null hypothesis is tested and an objective prior is sought for the alternative hypothesis. In particular,…
In this paper we show that to explain the observed distribution of amplitudes in a large sample of quasar lightcurves, a significant contribution from microlensing is required. This implies the existence of a cosmologically distributed…
Accurately determining the properties of stars is of prime importance for characterizing stellar populations in our Galaxy. The field of asteroseismology has been thought to be particularly successful in such an endeavor for stars in…