The AstroStat Slog

There will be a special session at the 213th AAS meeting on meaning from surveys and population studies (SPS). Until then, it might be useful to pull out some interesting and relevant papers and questions/challenges as a preliminary to the meeting. I will not list astronomical catalogs and surveys only, which are literally countless these days but will bring out some if they change the way how science is performed with a description of the catalog (the best example would be SDSS, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, to my knowledge). Continue reading ‘[SPS] Testing Completeness’ »

Physicists believe that the Gaussian law has been proved in mathematics while mathematicians think that it was experimentally established in physics — Henri Poincare

Continue reading ‘Why Gaussianity?’ »

I’ve been heard so much, without knowing fundamental reasons (most likely physics), about coverage problems from astrostat/phystat groups. This paper might be an interest for those: Interval Estimation in Exponential Families by Brown, Cai,and DasGupta ; Statistica Sinica (2003), 13, pp. 19-49

Abstract summary:
The authors investigated issues in interval estimation of the mean in the exponential family, such as binomial, Poisson, negative binomial, normal, gamma, and a sixth distribution. The poor performance of the Wald interval has been known not only for discrete cases but for nonnormal continuous cases with significant negative bias. Their computation suggested that the equal tailed Jeffreys interval and the likelihood ratio interval are the best alternatives to the Wald interval. Continue reading ‘Coverage issues in exponential families’ »