Probability and Statistics in Astronomical Machine Learning and Data Minin
Abstract
Statistical issues peculiar to astronomy have implications for machine learning and data mining. It should be obvious that statistics lies at the heart of machine learning and data mining. Further it should be no surprise that the passive observational nature of astronomy, the concomitant lack of sampling control, and the uniqueness of its realm (the whole universe!) lead to some special statistical issues and problems.
As described in the Introduction to this volume, data analysis technology is largely keeping up with major advances in astrophysics and cosmology, even driving many of them. And I realize that there are many scientists with good statistical knowledge and instincts, especially in the modern era I like to call the Age of Digital Astronomy. Nevertheless, old impediments still lurk, and the aim of this chapter is to elucidate some of them. Many experiences with smart people doing not-so-smart things (cf. the anecdotes collected in the Appendix here) have convinced me that the cautions given here need to be emphasized. Consider these four points: 1. Data analysis often involves searches of many cases, for example, outcomes of a repeated experiment, for a feature of the data. 2. The feature comprising the goal of such searches may not be defined unambiguously until the search is carried out, or perhaps vaguely even then. 3. The human visual system is very good at recognizing patterns in noisy contexts. 4. People are much easier to convince of something they want to believe, or already believe, as opposed to unpleasant or surprising facts. One can argue that all four are good things during the initial, exploratory phases of most data analysis. They represent the curiosity and creativity of the scientific process, especially during the exploration of data collections from new observational programs such as all-sky surveys in wavelengths not accessed before or sets of images of a planetary surface not yet explored. On the other hand, confirmatory scientific studies need to adopt much more circumscribed methods. Each of these issues conceals statistical traps that can lead to grave errors, as we shall now see. These four ideas thread most of the following discussion.- Publication:
-
Advances in Machine Learning and Data Mining for Astronomy
- Pub Date:
- March 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012amld.book...27S