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Register a new userRealizing the potential of astrostatistics and astroinformatics
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This Astro2020 State of the Profession Consideration White Paper highlights the growth of astrostatistics and astroinformatics in astronomy, identifies key issues hampering the maturation of these new subfields, and makes recommendations for structural improvements at different levels that, if acted upon, will make significant positive impacts across astronomy.
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The history and current status of the cross-disciplinary fields of astrostatistics and astroinformatics are reviewed. Astronomers need a wide range of statistical methods for both data reduction and science analysis. With the proliferation of high-throughput telescopes, efficient large scale computational methods are also becoming essential. However, astronomers receive only weak training in these fields during their formal education. Interest in the fields is rapidly growing with conferences organized by scholarly societies, textbooks and tutorial workshops, and research studies pushing the frontiers of methodology. R, the premier language of statistical computing, can provide an important software environment for the incorporation of advanced statistical and computational methodology into the astronomical community.
In the past two years, the environment within which astronomers conduct their data analysis and management has rapidly changed. Working Groups associated with international societies and Big Data projects have emerged to support and stimulate the new fields of astroinformatics and astrostatistics. Sponsoring societies include the Intenational Statistical Institute, International Astronomical Union, American Astronomical Society, and Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project. They enthusiastically support cross-disciplinary activities where the advanced capabilities of computer science, statistics and related fields of applied mathematics are applied to advance research on planets, stars, galaxies and the Universe. The ADASS community is encouraged to join these organizations and to explore and engage in their public communication Web site, the Astrostatistics and Astroinformatics Portal (http://asaip.psu.edu).
Over the past century, major advances in astronomy and astrophysics have been largely driven by improvements in instrumentation and data collection. With the amassing of high quality data from new telescopes, and especially with the advent of deep and large astronomical surveys, it is becoming clear that future advances will also rely heavily on how those data are analyzed and interpreted. New methodologies derived from advances in statistics, computer science, and machine learning are beginning to be employed in sophisticated investigations that are not only bringing forth new discoveries, but are placing them on a solid footing. Progress in wide-field sky surveys, interferometric imaging, precision cosmology, exoplanet detection and characterization, and many subfields of stellar, Galactic and extragalactic astronomy, has resulted in complex data analysis challenges that must be solved to perform scientific inference. Research in astrostatistics and astroinformatics will be necessary to develop the state-of-the-art methodology needed in astronomy. Overcoming these challenges requires dedicated, interdisciplinary research. We recommend: (1) increasing funding for interdisciplinary projects in astrostatistics and astroinformatics; (2) dedicating space and time at conferences for interdisciplinary research and promotion; (3) developing sustainable funding for long-term astrostatisics appointments; and (4) funding infrastructure development for data archives and archive support, state-of-the-art algorithms, and efficient computing.
(Abridged from Executive Summary) This white paper focuses on the interdisciplinary fields of astrostatistics and astroinformatics, in which modern statistical and computational methods are applied to and developed for astronomical data. Astrostatistics and astroinformatics have grown dramatically in the past ten years, with international organizations, societies, conferences, workshops, and summer schools becoming the norm. Canadas formal role in astrostatistics and astroinformatics has been relatively limited, but there is a great opportunity and necessity for growth in this area. We conducted a survey of astronomers in Canada to gain information on the training mechanisms through which we learn statistical methods and to identify areas for improvement. In general, the results of our survey indicate that while astronomers see statistical methods as critically important for their research, they lack focused training in this area and wish they had received more formal training during all stages of education and professional development. These findings inform our recommendations for the LRP2020 on how to increase interdisciplinary connections between astronomy and statistics at the institutional, national, and international levels over the next ten years. We recommend specific, actionable ways to increase these connections, and discuss how interdisciplinary work can benefit not only research but also astronomys role in training Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP) in Canada.
Data volumes from multiple sky surveys have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into tens (or hundreds) of petabytes in the next decade. This exponential growth of new data both enables and challenges effective astronomical research, requiring new approaches. Thus far, astronomy has tended to address these challenges in an informal and ad hoc manner, with the necessary special expertise being assigned to e-Science or survey science. However, we see an even wider scope and therefore promote a broader vision of this data-driven revolution in astronomical research. For astronomy to effectively cope with and reap the maximum scientific return from existing and future large sky surveys, facilities, and data-producing projects, we need our own information science specialists. We therefore recommend the formal creation, recognition, and support of a major new discipline, which we call Astroinformatics. Astroinformatics includes a set of naturally-related specialties including data organization, data description, astronomical classification taxonomies, astronomical concept ontologies, data mining, machine learning, visualization, and astrostatistics. By virtue of its new stature, we propose that astronomy now needs to integrate Astroinformatics as a formal sub-discipline within agency funding plans, university departments, research programs, graduate training, and undergraduate education. Now is the time for the recognition of Astroinformatics as an essential methodology of astronomical research. The future of astronomy depends on it.
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