A preferential attachment model for the stellar initial mass function

DOI10.1214/19-EJS1556MaRDI QIDQ2414502zbMATH OpenWikidataFDO

Authors Jessi Cisewski-Kehe, Grant Weller, Chad M. Schafer

Publication date 17 May 2019

Published in Electronic Journal of Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.11306, https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ejs/1555380051

zbMATH Keywords

approximate Bayesian computationdependent dataastrostatisticscomputational statisticscluster of strasstellar initial mass function

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Classification and discrimination; cluster analysis (statistical aspects) (62H30) Applications of statistics to physics (62P35) Statistical astronomy (85A35) Galactic and stellar structure (85A15)

Abstract: Accurate specification of a likelihood function is becoming increasingly difficult in many inference problems in astronomy. As sample sizes resulting from astronomical surveys continue to grow, deficiencies in the likelihood function lead to larger biases in key parameter estimates. These deficiencies result from the oversimplification of the physical processes that generated the data, and from the failure to account for observational limitations. Unfortunately, realistic models often do not yield an analytical form for the likelihood. The estimation of a stellar initial mass function (IMF) is an important example. The stellar IMF is the mass distribution of stars initially formed in a given cluster of stars, a population which is not directly observable due to stellar evolution and other disruptions and observational limitations of the cluster. There are several difficulties with specifying a likelihood in this setting since the physical processes and observational challenges result in measurable masses that cannot legitimately be considered independent draws from an IMF. This work improves inference of the IMF by using an approximate Bayesian computation approach that both accounts for observational and astrophysical effects and incorporates a physically-motivated model for star cluster formation. The methodology is illustrated via a simulation study, demonstrating that the proposed approach can recover the true posterior in realistic situations, and applied to observations from astrophysical simulation data.

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