Event Details

The large datasets being generated by current and future astronomical surveys give us the ability to answer questions at a breadth and depth that was previously unimaginable. Yet datasets which strive to be generally useful are rarely ideal for any particular science case: measurements are often sparser, noisier, or more heterogeneous than one might hope. To adapt tried-and-true statistical methods to this new milieu of large-scale, noisy, heterogeneous data often requires us to re-examine these methods: to pry off the lid of the black box and consider the assumptions they are built on, and how these assumptions can be relaxed for use in this new context. In this talk I’ll explore a case study of such an exercise: our extension of the Lomb-Scargle Periodogram for use with the sparse, multi-color photometry expected from LSST. For studies involving RR-Lyrae-type variable stars, we expect this multiband algorithm to push the effective depth of LSST two magnitudes deeper than for previously used methods.