The Cosmostatistics Initiative.
The Cosmostatistics Initiative (COIN), an international group built under the auspices of the International Astrostatistics Association (IAA), aims to create an interdisciplinary environment where collaborations between astronomers, statisticians and machine learning experts can flourish.
COIN is designed to promote the development of a new family of tools for data exploration in astrophysics and cosmology. The group is lead by Rafael S. de Souza and researchers willing to join are welcomed to contact him!
The Residence Program.
An unstructured and intimate meeting, offering opportunities for collaborative research, learning, and sharing of expertise with concrete scientific outcomes.
The main goal of the CRPs is to benefit young and experienced researchers in astronomy, statistics and computer science alike. Thus contributing to the establishment of Astrostatistics as a discipline on its own.
We also aim at creating a personal bound among our members, provinding a completely informal environment where such intimate connections can grow.
Thus, the program is held in a residence and participants share not only scientific discussions, but participate in logistic decisions during the program.
The first COIN residence program, held in Lisbon 2014, was the first of its kind. We put together a core team working against the clock in order to prepare a series of articles applying modern statistical methods in astronomy.
The researchers worked with approximate Bayesian computation for inference of cosmological parameters, logistic regression for exploration of N-body/hydro cosmological simulations and gamma regression for estimate of photometric redshifts.
Link to the papers, codes an tutorials resulting from CRP #1 are available in the COINtoolbox on GitHub.
In 2015, the second edition will happen in the Isle of Wight, UK, thanks to the support of the Imperial College London and MSSL - University College of London.
Live updates about the activities being developed will be advertised here, in the ASAIP facebook page and through twitter.