Today was group meetings day. In the Stars meeting, John Brewer (Yale) told us about fitting stellar spectra with temperature, gravity, and composition, epoch-by-epoch for a multi-epoch radial-velocity survey. He is trying to understand how consistent his fitting is, what degeneracies there are, and whether there are any changes in temperature or gravity that co-vary with radial-velocity jitter. No results yet, but we had suggestions for tests to do. His presentation reinforced my idea (with Megan Bedell) to beat spectral variations against asteroseismological oscillation phase.
In the Cosmology meeting, Peter Melchior (Princeton) told us about attempts to turn de-blending into a faster and better method that is appropriate for HSC and LSST-generation surveys. He blew us away with a tiny piece of deep HSC imaging, and then described a method for deblending that looks like non-negative matrix factorization, plus convex regularizations. He has done his research on the mathematics around convex regularizations, reminding me that we should do a more general workshop on these techniques. We discussed many things in the context of Melchior's project; one interesting point is that the deblending problem doesn't necessarily require good models of galaxies (Dustin Lang and I always think of it as a modeling problem); it just needs to deliver a good set of weights for dividing up photons.
Here's a deep connection/observation: (i) the Wasserstein distance can be a good metric for identifying nearest points in an image space; (ii) a fast way to compute (approximate) Wasserstein distances is via a convex regularisation (which gives a Sinkhorn method solution). (
ReplyDeleteI learnt this from Pierre Jacob: https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.05146 )