Statistics for Twenty-first Century Astrometry

William H. Jefferys
Department of Astronomy - University of Texas at Austin, USA


H.K. Eichhorn had a lively interest in statistics during his entire scientific career, and made a number of significant contributions to the statistical treatment of astrometric problems. In the past decade, a strong movement has taken place for the reintroduction of Bayesian methods of statistics back into astronomy, driven by new understandings of the power of these methods as well as by the adoption of computationally-intensive simulation methods to the practical solution of Bayesian problems. In this paper I will discuss how Bayesian methods may be applied to the statistical discussion of astrometric data, with special reference to several problems that were of interest to Eichhorn.

Download this abstract as [tex] or [html]