2019-11-25

products of Gaussians, Joker

As my loyal reader knows, I love that products of Gaussians are themselves Gaussians! The result is that there are many factorizations of a Gaussian into many different Gaussian products. As my loyal reader also knows, Adrian Price-Whelan (Flatiron) and I found a bug in our code The Joker which fits radial-velocity data with Keplerian orbital models; this bug is related to the fundamental factorization of Gaussians that underlies the method. Today Price-Whelan showed me results from the fixed code, and we discussed them (and the priors we are using in our marginalization), along with the paper we are writing about the factorization. Yes, people, this is my MO: When you have a big bug—or really a big think-o or conceptual error—don't just fix it, write a paper about it! That's the origin of my paper on the K-correction. We are also contemplating writing a note about how you can constrain time-domain signals with periods longer than the interval over which you are observing them!

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