Summer School in Statistics for Astronomy

Penn State is continuing its annual Summer Schools in Statistics designed for graduate students and researchers in astronomy. The tenth summer school is an intensive week covering basic statistical inference, several fields of applied statistics, and the R computing environment.

A repertoire of well-established techniques applicable to observational astronomy and physics are developed. Classroom instruction is interspersed with hands-on analysis of astronomical data using the open-source R software package. The course is taught by a team of statistics and astronomy professors with opportunity for discussion of methodological issues. The topics covered include:

• Exploratory data analysis
• Hypothesis testing and parameter estimation
• Regression
• Bootstrap resampling
• Model selection & validation
• Maximum likelihood methods
• Non-parametric methods
• Multivariate methods
• Clustering and classification
• MCMC
• Bayesian Analysis
• Spatial Statistics
• Time series