The Physical Challenges of Astro-Statistics

LOCATION: Sport & Kurhotel at Bad Moos - Via Val Fiscalina 27, 39030, Sexten

DETAILS

Astrostatistics is developing fast as astronomy is confronted to huge volumes of data. This constitutes undoubtly a new era through a move from object- to data-driven astrophysics. We can distinguish two types of challenges: the first one is related to the exploration of the data space and the second one is the physical interpretation of the results of this exploration. Astrostatistics cannot be reduced to the technical issues brought by methods and algorithms required to analyse the data. Despite these tools are not part of the cursus of astronomers, things are changing rapidly through schools, training sessions, collaborations with experts (statisticians) as well as developments of specific tools adapted to astronomical data. The use of new techniques pervades the astronomical literature. To convince more and more astronomers to switch to this new approach to do science, it is important to demonstrate the relevance of astrostatistics results.

This is the second type of challenges astrostatistics faces and this is the main scope of this workshop. The question that needs to be solved is the following: how can we reconnect statistical results obtained by automatic tools such as machine learning or hypothesis testing, with object-driven inferences derived from visual inspection, modelisation or numerical simulation? How do we reconcile a statistical, hence fuzzy, classification with the visual Hubble sequence of galaxies? How do we describe, synthetize, the data cubes (images + spectra) obtained by IFUs? How can we constrain a model of stellar evolution with the statistics of billions of stars? How do we characterize a scaling law in a 4-D or 10-D dimension parameter space?

Some of the specific topics that could be discussed during this workshop are the interpretability of machine learning and statistical results; the use of unsupervised clustering of data, spectra and images; the selection of variables depending on their availability; the fact that correlation is not causality (what are the latent variables?); the outlier detection and charaterisation in the context of Big Data; the hypothesis testing techniques to evaluate the confidence in detection of faint sources; fuzzy classification and probabilistic physics; astrostatistics in numerical simulations ; etc.

We want to focus particularly on the connection between the tools and the astrophysics, between data analysis and science. Similarly to telescopes and detectors that observe the Universe, astrostatistics is an ensemble of techniques that observe the data: what do we see and how can we understand?

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ORGANIZERS

Organizers: Prof. Mauro D’Onofrio (Dep. of Physics & Astronomy, University of Padova, Italy) Prof. Didier Fraix-Burnet (Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG) Université Grenoble Alpes