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2. STATISTICS AND ASTRONOMICAL SURVEYS

Large astronomical surveys from new, high-throughput detectors and observatories are powerful motivators for more effective statistical techniques. Observatories now frequently generate gigabytes of information every day, with terabyte size raw databases which produce reduced catalogues of 106-109 objects. These catalogues, which may include up to dozens of observational properties of each object, often contain heterogeneous populations which must be isolated prior to detailed analysis. Althoug there are many types of astronomical surveys with many different goals, the statistical problems arising in their analysis can often be divided into three stages. We treat the first two stages very briefly here to concentrate on the final phase.

Reducing raw data into images The treatment of the raw data from the telescope or satellite observatory can be very complex, and has embedded within it many choices of statistical methods. These methods are typically described in internal technical memoranda which are rarely published or publically examined, and sometimes are invisible except for comments in source code. The IRAS Faint Source Survey Explanatory Supplement (Moshir et al. 1992) offers a glimpse into this complex nether-world: a median filter is applied to reduce noise; outliers are detected to remove particle events; overlapping scans are combined and interpolated; fluxes are estimated with a trimmed mean; signal is extracted with a S / N geq 3.5 criterion; distinct sources are devined by a complicated source-merging procedure; sky positions are derived from recursive Kalman filtering and connected polynomial segment fitting to satellite gyroscope time series data. The IRAS analysis benefits from robust statistical procedures such as the median and trimmed mean rather than the usual mean, which have been developed by statisticians over the past 20 years (e.g., Hoaglin et al. 1983). The problems addressed here are specific to each instrument and survey, and general advice has limited value.

Reducing images to catalogues The analysis of astronomical images can be very complicated. In sparsely occupied images from photon-counting detectors (as in X-ray and gamma-ray astronomy), efforts concentrate on detecting sources above an uninteresting background. Methods include maximum likelihood analysis based on the Poisson distribution, matched filtering and Voronoi tesselations. In fully occupied grey-scale images, a wide variety of image restoration methods have been applied to deconvolve point spread functions and reduce noise: least squares fitting; Lucy-Richardson method; maximum entropy and other Bayesian methods, neural networks, Fourier and wavelet filtering (e.g., Narayan & Nityananda 1986; Perley et al. 1989; Hanisch & White 1993; Starck & Murtagh 1994; Lahav et al. 1995). Many of these methods rest upon developments in statistical methodology.

Much work has also been directed to the automated analysis and classification of objects on images, particularly the discrimination of stars from galaxies on optical band photographic plates and CCD images. Each object is characterized by a number of properties (e.g., moments of its spatial distribution, surface brightness, total brightness, concentration, asymmetry), which are then passed through a supervised classification procedure. Methods include multivariate clustering, Bayesian decision theory, neural networks, k-means partitioning, CART (Classification and Regression Trees) and oblique decision trees, mathematical morphology and related multiresolution methods (Bijaoui et al. 1997; White 1997). Such procedures are crucial to the creation of the largest astronomical databases with 1-2 billion objects derived from digitization of all-sky photographic surveys.

The scientific product of multi-wavelength surveys is frequently a large table with rows representing individual stars, galaxies, sources or locations and columns representing observed or inferred properties. Often a single survey effort will produce multiwavelength results, as in the four infrared of IRAS, the five photometric colors of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or spectral bands in the ROSAT All-Sky Survey. Analysis of such data is the domain of multivariate analysis. We therefore concentrate on multivariate statistical methodology in the following sections.

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