Statistical methods for astronomical data analysis (Q485489)

This book represents volume 3 of the Springer Series in Astrostatistics. The first two volumes of this series are entitled: Astrostatistical Challenges for the New Astronomy, and Astrostatistics and data mining, resp. The book starts with a 90-pages long chapter ``Introduction to Astrophysics''. It shortly covers and summarizes the following items: Sources of radiation, brightness of stars, Doppler shift, stellar motion, Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, variable stars, stellar population, galactic clusters, globular clusters, galaxies, Quasars, pulsars, Gamma ray bursts. As one can see, this introduction concentrates towards astronomical objects, whose observation needs typical statistical methods. The second chapter ``Introduction to Statistics'' introduces the main quantities for statistical uses, including histogram, correlation, regression and random variable. The following chapters deal with data mining, time series analysis, and Monte Carlo simulation, and give applications typical to astrophysics. Each chapter ends with a short reference list.