In the Dark

Didier Fraix-Burnet (IPAG), Stéphane Girard (Inria) and myself are organising a School of Statistics for Astrophysics, Stat4Astro, to be held in October in France. The primary goal of the School is to train astronomers to the use of modern statistical techniques. It also aims at bridging the gap between the two communities by emphasising on the practice during works in common, to give firm grounds to the theoretical lessons, and to initiate works on problems brought by the participants. There have been two previous sessions of this school, one on regression and one on clustering. The speakers of this edition, including Christian Robert, Roberto Trotta and David van Dyk, will focus on the Bayesian methodology, with the moral support of the Bayesian Society, ISBA. The interest of this statistical approach in astrophysics probably comes from its necessity and its success in determining the cosmological parameters…