Grace Telford (Rutgers) showed up in NYC today and we discussed the inference of star-formation histories from observations of resolved stellar populations. We discussed the point that the space being high dimensional (because, say, the star formation history is modeled as a set of 30-ish star-formation rates in bins), which leads to two problems. The first is that a maximum-likelihood or maximum-a-posteriori setting of the SFH will be atypical (in high dimensions, optima are atypical relative to one-sigma-ish parameter settings). The second is that the results are generally extremely prior-dependent, and the priors are usually made up by investigators, not any attempt to represent their actual beliefs. We talked about ways to mitigate against these issues.
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