Related papers: Deriving star formation histories: Inverting HR di…

Max-stable processes provide natural models for the modelling of spatial extreme values observed at a set of spatial sites. Full likelihood inference for max-stable data is, however, complicated by the form of the likelihood function as it…

We compare multi-wavelength SFR indicators out to z~3 in GOODS-South. Our analysis uniquely combines U-to-8um photometry from FIREWORKS, MIPS 24um and PACS 70, 100, and 160um photometry from the PEP survey, and Ha spectroscopy from the SINS…

Understanding the star formation rate (SFR) variability and how it depends on physical properties of galaxies is important for developing and testing the theory of galaxy formation. We investigate how statistical measurements of the…

We develop a new method to account for the finite lifetimes of stars and trace individual abundances within a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation. At variance with previous methods, based on the storage of the (binned) past star…

This paper studies the maximum cardinality matching problem in stochastically evolving graphs. We formally define the arrival-departure model with stochastic departures. There, a graph is sampled from a specific probability distribution and…

We propose a new methodology to develop heuristic algorithms using tree decompositions. Traditionally, such algorithms construct an optimal solution of the given problem instance through a dynamic programming approach. We modify this…

We study the problem of inferring sparse time-varying Markov random fields (MRFs) with different discrete and temporal regularizations on the parameters. Due to the intractability of discrete regularization, most approaches for solving this…

Ground-based optical surveys such as PanSTARRS, DES, and LSST, will produce large catalogs to limiting magnitudes of r > 24. Star-galaxy separation poses a major challenge to such surveys because galaxies---even very compact…

We present a new method for reconstructing two-dimensional mass maps of galaxy clusters from the image distortion of background galaxies. In contrast to most previous approaches, which directly convert locally averaged image ellipticities…

A comprehensive study of the measurement of star formation histories from colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) is presented, with an emphasis on a variety of subtle issues involved in the generation of model CMDs and maximum likelihood…

We address the problem of data clustering by introducing an unsupervised, parameter free approach based on maximum likelihood principle. Starting from the observation that data sets belonging to the same cluster share a common information,…

We introduce new methods for robust high-precision photometry from well-sampled images of a non-crowded field with a strongly varying point-spread function. For this work, we used archival imaging data of the open cluster M37 taken by MMT…

This work develops change-point methods for statistics of high-frequency data. The main interest is in the volatility of an It\^{o} semi-martingale, the latter being discretely observed over a fixed time horizon. We construct a…

We present a probabilistic approach for inferring the parameters of the present day power-law stellar mass function (MF) of a resolved young star cluster. This technique (a) fully exploits the information content of a given dataset; (b)…

Maximum Likelihood Estimation of continuous variable models can be very challenging in high dimensions, due to potentially complex probability distributions. The existence of multiple interdependencies among variables can make it very…

We present a new method that incorporates the horizontal branch morphology into synthetic colour-magnitude diagram based star formation history determinations. This method, we call MORGOTH, self-consistently takes into account all the…

Accurate specification of a likelihood function is becoming increasingly difficult in many inference problems in astronomy. As sample sizes resulting from astronomical surveys continue to grow, deficiencies in the likelihood function lead…

We address the issue of recovering the structure of large sparse directed acyclic graphs from noisy observations of the system. We propose a novel procedure based on a specific formulation of the l1-norm regularized maximum likelihood,…

We present a classification of galaxies in the Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) 3$\pi$ survey based on their recent star formation history and morphology. Specifically, we train and test two Random Forest (RF) classifiers using photometric features…

Variable stars play a key role in understanding the Milky Way and the universe. The era of astronomical big data presents new challenges for quick identification of interesting and important variable stars. Accurately estimating the periods…