Harley Wood Winter School 2012 Practical Statistics for Astrophysicists

Handling statistics forms a crucial part of any data analysis, but it is something that is somewhat neglected in our formal education, or taught more formally than practically. This lecture will try to bridge that gap, and outline the basic data analysis techniques that are most commonly used in astrophysics, including some common pitfalls and tips-of-the-trade. To focus the discussion we will use cosmology as a case study, and look at the constraints on our cosmological model parameters that can be derived from things like supernovae (SNe), baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), and the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In other words, how one generates the contours seen in Fig. 1 from the raw cosmological data we measure.