VOStat: A Distributed Statistical Toolkit for the Virtual Observatory
M. J. Graham, Stanislav George Djorgovski, Ashish A. Mahabal, Roy D. Williams, Gutti Jogesh Babu, Eric D. Feigelson, D. E. vanden Berk, Robert C. Nichol, Larry H. Wasserman · CaltechAUTHORS (California Institute of Technology) · 2004
The nature of astronomical data is changing: data volumes are following Moore's law with a doubling every 18 months and data sets consisting of a billion data vectors in a 100-dimensional parameter space are becoming commonplace. Sophisticated statistical techniques are crucial to fully and efficiently exploit these and maximize the scientific return. A long-standing limitation, however, on the range and capability of such analyses has been the paucity of non-proprietary software. VOStat is the result of a cross-disciplinary collaboration between astronomers and statisticians to meet these challenges; it is a prototype knowledge-based statistical toolkit implemented within the VO paradigm for the entire astronomical community. VOStat consists of an easily extensible distributed web-based framework transparently accessed via a single science endpoint. An exploratory science application is presented to demonstrate some of the functionality currently offered by VOStat.