Astrostatistical Challenges for the New Astronomy / Springer Series in Astrostatistics Bd.1 (PDF)

Joseph M. Hilbe is President of the International Astrostatistics Association, and chair of the ISI astrostatistics committee. ISI is the International Statistical Institute, the world association of statisticians. Prof. Hilbe is also editor-in-chief of the Springer Series in Astrostatistics and chaired the World Statistics Congress invited and special topics sessions from which eight of the book's monographs originated. An elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association and Elected Member of the ISI, Professor Hilbe is author of several leading texts in statistical modeling, including "bestsellers'' Negative Binomial Regression, 2nd ed. (2011, Cambridge Univ Press) and Logistic Regression Models (2009, Chapman & Hall/CRC) among others.

From the book reviews:

“This publication is a timely survey of advanced data science techniques that are increasingly common and necessary in the data-rich scientific discipline of astronomical research. … Astronomers and their statistician collaborators will benefit from this book. … this book is a very worthy research companion, one that should be kept within reach by any researcher in the field.” (Kirk Borne, Mathematical Reviews, June, 2014)



“This is an excellent book, covering advances in statistical analysis of astronomical data. … This book will be of great interest to researchers whose inference problems may go beyond what a standard MCMC algorithm can handle, or those who want a detailed but comprehensible summary of some recent advances in astronomical data analysis. It is highly recommended.” (Alan Heavens, The Observatory, Vol. 133 (1236), October, 2013)

The chapters represent the state-of-the-art of statistical work in astronomy. The book opens with a historical overview of the many intersections between astronomy and statistics,written by Professor Hilbe...it offers an exciting synthesis of two vibrant research fields—astronomy/cosmology and Bayesian statistics...The content of the book is rich and varied. There are chapters on the analysis of supernova data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and of the large scale (galaxy) structure of the universe; on the search for new planets; on the classification of stars and galaxies; on the detection of anomalous sources, which can lead to the discovery of new astronomical objects. From the statistical perspective, the reader will encounter Bayesian hierarchical models, nonlinear models, a variety of classification procedures, Gaussian random fields, and efficient posterior distribution samplers. In terms of both the applications and the methodologies discussed, this is an advanced text, very much on the forefront of research.Technometrics, 56:1