Related papers: Quasar Factor Analysis -- An Unsupervised and Prob…
Unsupervised learning aims at the discovery of hidden structure that drives the observations in the real world. It is essential for success in modern machine learning. Latent variable models are versatile in unsupervised learning and have…
Quasars have long been known as intrinsically variable sources, but the physical mechanism underlying the temporal optical/UV variability is still not well understood. We propose a novel nonparametric method for modeling and forecasting the…
The Lyman-$\alpha$ forest refers to the series of absorption features observed in the spectra of distant quasars that are produced by neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium. Observed over a wide range of redshifts with both ground-…
The locally constant field approximation (LCFA) has to date underpinned the numerical simulation of quantum processes in laser-plasma physics and astrophysics, but its validity has recently been questioned in the parameter regime of current…
Latent factor models are widely used to discover and adjust for hidden variation in modern applications. However, most methods do not fully account for uncertainty in the latent factors, which can lead to miscalibrated inferences such as…
New observations of the quasar HE0515$-$4414 have been made using the HARPS spectrograph on the ESO 3.6m telescope, aided by the Laser Frequency Comb (LFC). We present three important advances for $\alpha$ measurements in quasar absorption…
This article focuses on covariance estimation for multi-study data. Popular approaches employ factor-analytic terms with shared and study-specific loadings that decompose the variance into (i) a shared low-rank component, (ii)…
We present variability and multi-wavelength photometric information for the 933 known quasars in the QUEST Variability Survey. These quasars are grouped into variable and non-variable populations based on measured variability confidence…
We investigate the large-scale inhomogeneities of the hydrogen ionizing radiation field in the Universe at redshift z=3. Using a raytracing algorithm, we simulate a model in which quasars are the dominant sources of radiation. We make use…
We measure the power spectrum, P_F(k,z), of the transmitted flux in the Ly-alpha forest using 3035 high redshift quasar spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This sample is almost two orders of magnitude larger than any previously…
Strongly lensed quadruply imaged quasars (quads) are extraordinary objects. They are very rare in the sky -- only a few tens are known to date -- and yet they provide unique information about a wide range of topics, including the expansion…
The UV radiation from a quasar leaves a characteristic pattern in the distribution of ionized hydrogen throughout the surrounding space. This pattern or light echo propagates through the intergalactic medium at the speed of light, and can…
Quasar spectra carry the imprint of foreground intergalactic medium (IGM) through absorption features. In particular, absorption caused by neutral hydrogen gas, the ``Ly$\alpha$ forest,'' is a key spectroscopic tracer for cosmological…
Motivation: Protein function prediction is a challenging task and an open problem in computational biology. The Critical Assessment of protein Function Annotation (CAFA) is a triennial, community-driven initiative that provides an…
Groups and clusters of galaxies hosting a quasar can be found through the detection of Lyman-alpha absorption lines beyond the quasar redshift. The effect occurs whenever the distortion to the redshift distribution of Lyman-alpha clouds…
The local-constant-field approximation (LCFA) is an essential theoretical tool for investigating strong-field QED phenomena in background electromagnetic fields with complex spacetime structure. In our previous work…
This work considers estimation and forecasting in a multivariate, possibly high-dimensional count time series model constructed from a transformation of a latent Gaussian dynamic factor series. The estimation of the latent model parameters…
Numerous estimators have been proposed for factor analysis, and their statistical properties have been extensively studied. In the early 2000s, a novel matrix factorization-based approach, known as Matrix Decomposition Factor Analysis…
We present the Lyman-$\alpha$ (Ly$\alpha$) and ultraviolet (UV) luminosity function (LF), in bins of redshift, of quasars selected in the Physics of the Accelerating Universe Survey (PAUS). A sample of 915 objects was selected at…
The Bayesian approach to feature extraction, known as factor analysis (FA), has been widely studied in machine learning to obtain a latent representation of the data. An adequate selection of the probabilities and priors of these bayesian…