The AstroStat Slog

The Vatican adopts the FITS standard. Yes, really.

(via /.)

So far, I didn’t complain much related to my “statistician learning astronomy” experience. Instead, I’ve been trying to emphasize how fascinating it is. I hope that more statisticians can join this adventure when statisticians’ insights are on demand more than ever. However, this positivity seems not working so far. In two years of this slog’s life, there’s no posting by a statistician, except one about BEHR. Statisticians are busy and well distracted by other fields with more tangible data sets. Or compared to other fields, too many obstacles and too high barriers exist in astronomy for statisticians to participate. I’d like to talk about these challenges from my ends.^[1] Continue reading ‘data analysis system and its documentation’ »

1. This is quite an overdue posting. Links and associated content can be outdated.[↩]

VOConvert or ConVOT is a small java script which does file format conversion from fits to ascii or the other way around. These tools might be useful for statisticians who want to convert astronomers’ data format called fits into ascii quickly for a statistical analysis. Additionally, VOConvert creates an interim output for VOStat, designed for statistical data analysis from Virtual Observatory. The softwares and the list of Virtual Observatories around the world can be found at Virtual Observatory India. Please, check a link in VOstat (http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/slog/2007/vostat) for more information about VOstat.

R is a programming language and software for statistical computing and graphics. It is the most popular tool for statisticians and a widely used software for statistical data analysis thanks to the fact that its source code is freely available and it is fairly easy to access from installation to theoretical application.

Most of information about R can be found at R Project including the software itself and many add-on packages. These individually contributed packages serve particular statistical interests of their users. The documentation menu on the website and each packages contain extensive documentations of how-to’s. Some large packages include demos so that following the scripts in a demo makes R learning easy.
Continue reading ‘Learning R’ »

Generally, astronomical data archives are open to public. Also, astronomy has been the leading force of developing software and hardware to handle massive data, which nowadays receive spotlights from statistics. Although the astronomical data look easy to be accessed for some statistical challenges, compared to data sets of other disciplines, statistical applications on astronomical data are unlikely to be found. What is the cause of this long engagement period?
Continue reading ‘FITS to ASCII’ »