statistics
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Leon Lucy, R.I.P.
I have the unfortunate duty of using this blog to announce the death a couple of weeks ago of Professor Leon B Lucy, who had been a Visiting Professor working here at Imperial College from 1998. Leon got his PhD in the early 1960s at the University of Manchester, and after postdoctoral positions in Europe…
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ICIC
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Among the many other things I haven’t had time to blog about, this term we opened the new Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology, the culmination of several years of expansion in the Imperial Astrophysics group. In mid-March we had our in-house grand opening, with a ribbon-cutting by the group’s most famous alumnus. Statistics and…
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I think I’m a Bayesian. Am I wrong?
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Continuing my recent, seemingly interminable, series of too-technical posts on probability theory… To understand this one you’ll need to remember Bayes’ Theorem, and the resulting need for a Bayesian statistician to come up with an appropriate prior distribution to describe her state of knowledge in the absence of the experimental data she is considering, updated…
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The Controversy about Hypothesis Testing
I spent a quick couple of days last week at the The Controversy about Hypothesis Testing meeting in Madrid. The topic of the meeting was indeed the question of “hypothesis testing“, which I addressed in a post a few months ago: how do you choose between conflicting interpretations of data? The canonical version of this…
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One chance in 3.5 million
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Yes, more on statistics. In a recent NY Times article, science reporter Dennis Overbye discusses recent talks from Fermilab and CERN scientists which may hint at the discovery of the much-anticipated Higgs Boson. The executive summary is: it hasn’t been found yet. But in the course of the article, Overbye points out that To qualify…
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Astrostatistics at the Royal Astronomical Society
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This week I’m co-organizing a meeting at the Royal Astronomical Society in London, “Novel methods for the exploitation of large astronomical and cosmological data sets“. It’s an unwieldy title, but we’ll be discussing the implication of the huge flood of astronomical data for cosmology and astrophysics. How do we deal with the sheer volume —…
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Swedish Statistics
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[Apologies to those of you who may have seen an inadvertantly-published unfinished version of this post] I’ve just returned from a week at the Annual meeting of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics in Gothenburg, Sweden. It’s always instructive to go to meetings outside of one’s specialty, outside of the proverbial comfort zone. I’ve been in…
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Opening the box
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This post is a work in progress, but I’ve decided to post it in its unfinished state. Comments and questions welcome! This week I went to a seminar on the new results from the MiniBooNE experiment given here at Imperial by Morgan Wascko. The MiniBooNE results have been discussed in depth elsewhere. Like MINOS last…
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