Archive for June, 2019

The ASSESS group roster 2019

Posted June 27, 2019 By grigoris
The ASSESS group during the Supernova Remnants II meeting in Chania, Greece. From left: Frank Tramper, Grigoris Maravelias, Alceste Bonanos, Ming Yang, Stephan de Wit  (photo by Dimitra Abartzi).

The ASSESS group during the Supernova Remnants II meeting in Chania, Freece (photo by Dimitra Abartzi)

During the last four days I was busy with the actual materialization of the Astrostatistics Summer School Crete 2019, which took place at the University of Crete, in Heraklion (18-21 June 2019). My duties were mainly those of the Teaching Assistant and I contributed with a short presentation of the Random Forests method for classification. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to post more on this school, so I ended up doing something only today, at the very last day!

In summary this is/was a school for graduate and early-stage post-docs to get a grasp of the modern field of Astrostatistics, which practically means the application of statistics in Astronomy which incorporates also machine-learning techniques. Topics include: Intro to Python and Jupyter notebook, linear regression, classical statistical distribution tests and hypothesis testing, Bayesian statistics, Markov-Chain Monte Carlo, machine learning classification/regression/clustering, time series analysis.

The school is split in “teaching”/explanatory parts (through Jupyter notebooks though where you could also interact and run the examples) and practical workshops, where important hands-on experience with all the tools presented was provided (and hopefully gained!). However, I think the importance lies in the fact that all the material is publicly available through a github repository: https://github.com/astrostatistics-in-crete (including the notebooks with the introduction notes, the exercises in the workshops, and the data). So this is a valuable source both for students of the school, as well as others interested to try and experiment with these tools.

During a session – from a galaxy far far away – at the Supernova Remnants II conference in Chania, Greece 2019 (photo/editing by A. Manousakis).

At the Supernova Remnants II conference

Posted June 5, 2019 By grigoris

Working and supporting the Supernova Remnants II conference in Chania, Greece 2019 (photo by A. Manousakis).