Astrostatistics

Astrostatistics is the study of stars, galaxies and the large scale structure of the Universe. Using data from telescopes and satellites, astrostatisticians study questions about the origin, evolution and fate of the universe. In the last decade, there has been a deluge of valuable data and statisticians play an important role in analyzing these data. Genovese and Wasserman are founding members of the International Computational Astrostatistics (INCA) group, a cross-disciplinary research team consisting of astrophysicists, statisticians and computer scientists. Within the department, several faculty, post-docs, and graduate students are members of the group; and other active members are drawn from the other departments at Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, and several international institutions. The statistics department works closely with the McWilliams Center for Cosmology at Carnegie Mellon as well as with the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh. Recent projects include: analysis of the cosmic microwave background, estimating the dark energy equation of state, analysis of galaxy spectra, detecting galaxy clusters, identifying filaments, and estimating density functions with truncated data. A common theme in this work is the goal of detecting subtle, nonlinear signals in noisy, high-dimensional data. Our primary focus is on using state-of-the-art data, and analytical methods, to advance cosmology.