2017-03-13

planning a paper sprint, completing a square

Lauren Anderson (Flatiron) are going to sprint this week on her paper on the noise-deconvolved color–magnitude diagram from the overlap of Gaia TGAS, 2MASS, and the PanSTARRS 3-d dust map. We started the day by making a long to-do list for the week, that could end in submission of the paper. My first job is to write down the data model for the data release we will do with the paper.

At lunch time I got distracted by my project to find a better metric than chi-squared to determine whether two noisily-observed objects (think: stellar spectra or detailed stellar abundance vectors) are identical or indistinguishable, statistically. The math involved completing a huge square (in linear-algebra space) twice. Yes, twice. And then the result is—in a common limit—exactly chi-squared! So my intuition is justified, and I know where it will under-perform.

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