2015-12-09

hierarchical photometric redshifts, combining unreliable methods

I am still not well, but well enough for the first time in ages to do my group meeting. It was great! Boris Leistedt (NYU) talked to us about his project to do template-based photometric redshifts but where he learns the templates too. I love this project; it is the only method I like for getting the redshift distribution in LSST past the (effective) spectroscopic magnitude limit. He gave us the philosophy and showed us some preliminary successes on simple fake data.

Andy Casey (Cambridge) talked to us about the different stellar parameter and abundance codes working in the Gaia-ESO spectroscopic survey collaboration. It is complicated! Getting reliable and valuable stellar quantities out of mutually inconsistent codes is not an easy problem. His methodologies are filled with good ideas. Brian McFee (NYU) suggested that he or we look at the crowd-sourcing literature for ideas here, and that turns out to be a very good idea. I proposed to Casey that we do some reading this coming week.

Right after group meeting, Casey diagnosed our bugs from yesterday and got the L1-regularized fitting working! We celebrated with ramen.

No comments:

Post a Comment