As my loyal reader knows, I am a big believer in trying to use the immense data sets we have on stars (in particular spectral data sets) to build data-driven models that have some kind of interpretability. The problem is interpretability, because purely data-driven models are uninterpretable by construction. My biggest success along these lines is The Cannon, first built by Melissa Ness (MPIA) and followed up by Anna Ho (Caltech) and Andy Casey (Cambridge). An amusing and mostly true summary of machine learning is that all supervised methods are, fundamentally, nearest-neighbor methods. This suggests that we might be able to make massive progress if we just started to look at stars with identical or near-identical spectra. And of course I mean in the space of spectral pixels, not in the space of labels derived from those pixels. I pitched this project to Marc Williamson (NYU) today, and sent him off with some reading. We are going to look for twins, but accounting for variations in radial velocity and line-spread function, so it won't be completely trivial.
Megan Bedell (Chicago) pointed out to me today that the binary masks used by the HARPS pipeline appeared on arXiv today. That's big for our radial-velocity projects.
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