hierarchical models

Tuesdays are low-research days, because teaching. But Boris Leistedt (NYU) made a proposal a few weeks ago that we write a pedagogical document on hierarchical modeling. He is thinking: in the style of our Data Analysis Recipes contributions. So we spent our meeting today brainstorming the content for the note. There definitely is a contribution for us to make. Key is to have some toy problems that map onto things astronomers care about but also illustrate the relevant methods and issues, and also are comprehensible to others in the natural sciences. We discussed fitting a line, fitting a mixture of lines, mixture-of-Gaussian models, and foreground-background models. I also like calibration models that have good causal structure.

I’m not sure if it counts as research, but I was involved today also in contract discussions for the Terra Hunting Experiment with HARPS3. We are trying to structure the Flatiron and Princeton buy-ins so that they help the project but also are executable by our institutions. That’s way above my pay grade but somehow I have to partially navigate it.