Related papers: Probabilistic record linkage in astronomy: Directi…
High-volume feature-rich data sets are becoming the bread-and-butter of 21st century astronomy but present significant challenges to scientific discovery. In particular, identifying scientifically significant relationships between sets of…
The beginning of the 21st century marked the "modern era of galaxy surveys" in astronomy. Rapid innovation in observing technology, combined with the base built by galaxy catalogs and atlases dating back centuries, sparked an explosion of…
To understand their data better, astronomers need to use statistical tools that are more advanced than traditional ``freshman lab'' statistics. As an illustration, the problem of combining apparently incompatible measurements of a quantity…
Satellite conjunctions involving "near misses" of space objects are becoming increasingly likely. One approach to risk analysis for them involves the computation of the collision probability, but this has been regarded as having some…
Cosmological galaxy surveys aim at mapping the largest volumes to test models with techniques such as cluster abundance, cosmic shear correlations or baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), which are designed to be independent of galaxy bias.…
Most major discoveries in astronomy are unplanned, and result from surveying the Universe in a new way, rather than by testing a hypothesis or conducting an investigation with planned outcomes. For example, of the 10 greatest discoveries…
Multi-connected universe models with space identification scales smaller than the size of the observable universe produce topological images of cosmic sources. We generalise to locally hyperbolic spaces the crystallographic method, aimed to…
Demographic studies of cosmic populations must contend with measurement errors and selection effects. We survey some of the key ideas astronomers have developed to deal with these complications, in the context of galaxy surveys and the…
Astronomical researchers often think of analysis and visualization as separate tasks. In the case of high-dimensional data sets, though, interactive exploratory data visualization can give far more insight than an approach where data…
A geometrical pattern is a set of points with all pairwise distances (or, more generally, relative distances) specified. Finding matches to such patterns has applications to spatial data in seismic, astronomical, and transportation…
Most scientific data will never be directly examined by scientists; rather it will be put into online databases where it will be analyzed and summarized by computer programs. Scientists increasingly see their instruments through online…
Directional clustering can be expected in cosmic ray observations due to purely statistical fluctuations for sources distributed randomly in the sky. We develop an analytic approach to estimate the probability of random cluster…
Correlations between planetary and stellar properties, particularly age, can provide insight on planetary formation and evolution processes. However, the underlying source of such trends can be unclear, and measurement uncertainties and…
Despite the large budgets spent annually on astronomical research equipment such as telescopes, instruments and supercomputers, the general trend is to analyse and view the resulting datasets using small, two-dimensional displays. We report…
The next generation of galaxy surveys, aiming to observe millions of galaxies, are expensive both in time and cost. This raises questions regarding the optimal investment of this time and money for future surveys. In a previous work, it was…
We review some of the recent developments and challenges posed by the data analysis in modern digital sky surveys, which are representative of the information-rich astronomy in the context of Virtual Observatory. Illustrative examples…
Many synoptic surveys are observing large parts of the sky multiple times. The resulting lightcurves provide a wonderful window to the dynamic nature of the universe. However, there are many significant challenges in analyzing these light…
Gravitational waves astronomy has opened a new opportunity to study the Universe. Full exploitation of this window can especially be provided by combining data coming from gravitational waves experiments with luminous tracers of the Large…
The search for faint emission or absorption lines in astronomical spectra has received considerable attention in recent years, especially in the X-ray wavelength range. These features usually appear as a deficit or excess of counts in a…
Recent and forthcoming advances in instrumentation, and giant new surveys, are creating astronomical data sets that are not amenable to the methods of analysis familiar to astronomers. Traditional methods are often inadequate not merely…