Abstract
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 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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Berger, J. 0.: 1985, Statistical Decision Theory and Bayesian Analysis, 2nd edn, Springer Verlag, New York, pp. 27–33.
Dellaportas, P., Forster, J. J. and Ntzoufras, I.: 1998, ‘On Bayesian model and variable selection using MCMC’. Technical report, Department of Statistics, Athens University of Economics and Business.
Eichhorn, H.: 1978, `Least-squares adjustment with probabilistic constraints’, Mon. Not. Royal Astron. Soc. 182, 355–360.
Eichhorn, H. and Smith, H.: 1996, ‘On the estimation of distances from trigonometric parallaxes’, Mon. Not. Royal Astron. Soc. 281, 211–218.
Eichhorn, H. and Standish, E. M.: 1981, ‘Remarks on nonstandard least-squares problems’, Astron. J. 86, 156–159.
Eichhorn, H. and Williams, C. A.: 1963, ‘On the systematic accuracy of photographic astrometric data’, Astron. J. 68, 221–231.
Gull, S. F.: 1988, ‘Bayesian inductive inference and maxiumum entropy’, in: G. J. Erickson and C. R. Smith (eds), Maximum-Entropy and Bayesian Methods in Science and Engineering, Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 153–174.
Jefferys, W. H. and Berger, J. 0.: 1992, ‘Occam’s razor and Bayesian statistics’, Am. Scient. 80, 64–72.
Loredo, T.: 1990, ‘From Laplace to Supernova 1987A: Bayesian inference in astrophysics’, in: P. Fogère (ed.), Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, pp. 81–142.
Müller, P.: 1991, ‘A generic approach to posterior integration and Bayesian sampling’, Technical report 91–09, Statistics Department, Purdue University.
Tanner, M. A.: 1993, Tools for Statistical Inference, Springer-Verlag, New York.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this paper
Cite this paper
Jefferys, W.H. (2001). Statistics for Twenty-First Century Astrometry. In: Dvorak, R., Henrard, J. (eds) New Developments in the Dynamics of Planetary Systems. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2414-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2414-2_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5702-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-2414-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive