Related papers: Selection functions of large spectroscopic surveys
In this paper we address the problem of feature selection when the data is functional, we study several statistical procedures including classification, regression and principal components. One advantage of the blinding procedure is that it…
Mixture models combine multiple components into a single probability density function. They are a natural statistical model for many situations in astronomy, such as surveys containing multiple types of objects, cluster analysis in various…
Star Formation Rates or SFRs are crucial to constrain theories of galaxy formation and evolution. SFRs are usually estimated via spectroscopic observations requiring large amounts of telescope time. We explore an alternative approach based…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is designed to provide an unprecedented optical imaging dataset that will support investigations of our Solar System, Galaxy and Universe, across half the sky and over ten years of repeated observation.…
In this paper a relative number density parameter, called the neighborhood function, is introduced so that the crowded nature of the neighborhood of individual sources can be described. With this parameter one can determine the probability…
Observational surveys of galaxies are not trivially related to single-epoch snapshots from computer simulations. Observationally, an increase in the distance along the line-of-sight corresponds to an earlier cosmic time at which the…
In certain situations that shall be undoubtedly more and more common in the Big Data era, the datasets available are so massive that computing statistics over the full sample is hardly feasible, if not unfeasible. A natural approach in this…
The last decade has seen enormous progress in understanding the structure of the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies via the production of large-scale digital surveys of the sky like 2MASS and SDSS, as well as specialized, counterpart…
In addition to the intrinsic clustering of galaxies themselves, the spatial distribution of galaxies observed in surveys is modulated by the presence of weak lensing due to matter in the foreground. This effect, known as magnification bias,…
Feature selection plays an important role in the data mining process. It is needed to deal with the excessive number of features, which can become a computational burden on the learning algorithms. It is also necessary, even when…
We present measurements of the luminosity and mass functions of low-mass stars constructed from a catalog of matched Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and 2 Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) detections. This photometric catalog contains more than…
We present robust statistical estimates of the accuracy of early-type galaxy stellar masses derived from spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting as functions of various empirical and theoretical assumptions. Using large samples…
Strong gravitational lensing gives access to the total mass distribution of galaxies. It can unveil a great deal of information about the lenses dark matter content when combined with the study of the lenses light profile. However,…
The integrated light of a stellar population, measured through photometric filters that are sensitive to the presence of young stars, is often used to infer the star formation rate (SFR) for that population. However, these techniques rely…
The majority of pulsar population synthesis studies performed to date have focused on isolated pulsar evolution. Those that have incorporated pulsar evolution within binary systems have tended to either treat binary evolution poorly of…
We investigate how well the redshift distributions of galaxies sorted into photometric redshift bins can be determined from the galaxy angular two-point correlation functions. We find that the uncertainty in the reconstructed redshift…
Photometric redshifts are commonly used to measure the distribution of galaxies in large surveys. However, the demands of ongoing and future large-scale cosmology surveys place very stringent limits on the redshift performance that are…
The accumulation of redshifts provides a significant observational bottleneck when using galaxy cluster surveys to constrain cosmological parameters. We propose a simple method to allow the use of samples where there is a fraction of the…
Selection bias is a serious potential problem for inference about relationships of scientific interest based on samples without well-defined probability sampling mechanisms. Motivated by the potential for selection bias in (a) estimated…
Only certain galaxies are included in surveys: those bright and large enough to be detectable as extended sources. Because gravitational lensing can make galaxies appear both brighter and larger, the presence of foreground inhomogeneities…