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We are pleased to present a Special Section on Statistics and Astronomy in this issue of the The Annals of Applied Statistics. Astronomy is an observational rather than experimental science; as a result, astronomical data sets both small…
In this paper we propose methods for inference of the geometric features of a multivariate density. Our approach uses multiscale tests for the monotonicity of the density at arbitrary points in arbitrary directions. In particular, a…
Cosmological parameter estimation from forthcoming experiments promise to reach much greater precision than current constraints. As statistical errors shrink, the required control over systematic errors increases. Therefore, models or…
The sufficient statistics of the one-point probability density function of the dark matter density field is worked out using cosmological perturbation theory and tested to the Millennium simulation density field. The logarithmic…
The weak lensing power spectrum is a powerful tool to probe cosmological parameters. Additionally, lensing peak counts contain cosmological information beyond the power spectrum. Both of these statistics can be affected by the preferential…
It is common practice in cosmology to model large-scale structure observables as lognormal random fields, and this approach has been successfully applied in the past to the matter density and weak lensing convergence fields separately. We…
Dense crowd counting aims to predict thousands of human instances from an image, by calculating integrals of a density map over image pixels. Existing approaches mainly suffer from the extreme density variances. Such density pattern shift…
A persistent challenge in astronomical machine learning is a systematic bias where predictions compress the dynamic range of true values-high values are consistently predicted too low while low values are predicted too high. Understanding…
The large-scale structure in cosmology is highly non-Gaussian at late times and small length scales, making it difficult to describe analytically. Parameter inference, data reconstruction, and data generation tasks in cosmology are greatly…
We describe several projects addressing the growth of galaxies and massive black holes, for which adaptive optics is mandatory to reach high spatial resolution but is also a challenge due to the lack of guide stars and long integrations. In…
In the era of precision cosmology, establishing the correct magnitude of statistical errors in cosmological parameters is of crucial importance. However, widely used approximations in galaxy surveys analyses can lead to parameter…
Count or non-negative data are often log transformed to improve heteroscedasticity and scaling. To avoid undefined values where the data are zeros, a small pseudocount (e.g. 1) is added across the dataset prior to applying the…
Spatial intensity moments computed on images can be used as a probe of the centroid, size, and orientation of pixelized sources such as stars and galaxies. However, all measurements made on images suffer from errors due to undersampling and…
We consider the problem of fitting a probability density function when it is constrained to have a given number of modal intervals. We propose a dynamic programming approach to solving this problem numerically. When this number is not…
Owing to their more extensive sky coverage and tighter control on systematic errors, future deep weak lensing surveys should provide a better statistical picture of the dark matter clustering beyond the level of the power spectrum. In this…
We aim at investigating potential biases in lensing and X-ray methods to measure the cluster mass profiles. We do so by performing realistic simulations of lensing and X-ray observations that are subsequently analyzed using observational…
We show that the natural scaling of measurement for a particular problem defines the most likely probability distribution of observations taken from that measurement scale. Our approach extends the method of maximum entropy to use…
Perhaps more than other physical sciences, astronomy is frequently statistical in nature. The objects under study are inaccessible to direct manipulation in the laboratory, so the astronomer is restricted to observing a few external…
We use an all--sky, complete sample of nearby galaxies, extracted from the LEDA data base, to map the optical galaxy density field in the nearby universe. In order to determine this field, we correct the redshift--dependent distances by…
The local space density of galaxies as a function of their basic structural parameters --like luminosity, surface brightness and scalesize-- is still poorly known. Our poor knowledge is mainly the result of strong selection biases against…