2011-06-03

Astrostatistics and Data Mining, day 5

On the last morning of the summer school, Lupton (Princeton) led (and I assisted in) a lab session on image processing, where the task was to patch missing data in an image using an interpolator based on a Gaussian process. During it, I realized (as Lupton had earlier) that an excellent cosmic-ray detector could be based on modeling an image with a Gaussian process, where the covariance of the process was set locally with the correct covariance expected given the point-spread function (and minimal assumptions about the properties of stars and galaxies in the images). I also realized that Lang and my Tractor project (current version number: vaporware) to model astronomical images could also be used as an interpolator for astronomical images (and a cosmic-ray detector; hell it does everything of course). All that said, interpolation is never necessary; missing data might be ugly, but it is only a problem if you are using algorithms you shouldn't be.

In other parts of the day, Tsalmantza and I worked on finishing our empirical spectral modeling method paper, with a goal of finishing next week.

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