ASTRO 415Introduction to Astrostatistics
Astronomical data are being produced at an unprecedented rate with large-scale telescopes, and thus data analytic skills to extract meaningful information from such massive astronomical datasets are important skills for astronomers. This course is designed to provide juniors or seniors in astronomy, who have no or little background in statistics, both theoretical background and practical experience on astronomical data analyses. For this purpose, the first half of the course will cover fundamental underpinnings of probability and statistical inference, and for the other half of the class, various statistical and machine learning tools will be introduced with hands-on coding experiences using a modern programming language, such as R.