Statistics for Astrophysics

This book includes the lectures given during the second session of the School of Statistics for Astrophysics that took place at l'École de Physique des Houches near Chamonix-Mont-Blanc in France, in October 2015. The subject is clustering and classification. Grouping objects obtained from the astronomical observations into distinct categories has always been a necessity imposed by their vast diversity. This is the case for stars, galaxies, asteroids, supernovae, active galactic nuclei, gamma-ray bursts and many others. This clustering (unsupervised classification) is a prerequisite to any physical modelisation. In this book, you will find statistical courses on basic to advanced methods with practical exercices using the R environment. This covers mixture model approaches, discriminant analyses, the Expectation-Maximization algorithm, clustering of variables, kernel methods, Support Vector Machine, clustering in the context of high-dimensional data, probabilistic graphical methods and phylogenetic approaches.

-------------

EAS Publications Series

The European Astronomical Society was founded in 1990. The purpose of the society is to contribute to and promote the advancement of astronomy, in its broadest sense, in Europe. With this aim in mind, EAS decided to launch this Publications Series, whose goal is to publish the proceedings of selected scientific meetings.
This series on astronomical subjects welcomes the proceedings of colloquia, workshops, schools of high standard..., whether they are held in Europe or elsewhere.