2011-10-28

mixtures of Gaussians for astronomy

Phil Marshall and I spent the day pair-coding a tiny Python package that fits a set of mixture-of-Gaussian models of increasing complexity to a PanSTARRS-produced catalog cutout image. It is insanely fast! (We did this outside of Lang's Tractor for reasons that are too annoying to explain here.) Our success means that in principle, any survey that is doing any kind of galaxy fitting can also, very easily, fit general non-parameteric models to everything: That is, we could have a variable-complexity description of every imaging patch. I love this just because I am a geek. Marshall loves this because maybe—just maybe—the mixture-of-Gaussians description of a patch of imaging will be close to a compact sufficient statistic for performing other kinds of fits or analyses. He has weak and strong gravitational lensing in mind, of course. More on this soon, I very much hope!

[In other news, Brian Cox thinks I am guilty of scientific misconduct. Fortunately, Sarah Kendrew (MPIA) doesn't.]

1 comment:

  1. well, maybe...but you make scientific misconduct hurt so good.

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