James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post

Harvard ADS: Regression for Astronomical Data with Realistic Distributions, Errors and Non-linearity

Paper abstract: We have developed a new regression technique, the maximum likelihood (ML)-based method and its variant, the KS-test based method, designed to obtain unbiased regression results from typical astronomical data. A normalizing flow model is employed to automatically estimate the unobservable intrinsic distribution of the independent variable as well as the unobservable correlation between uncertainty level and intrinsic value of both independent and dependent variables from the observed data points in a variational inference based empirical Bayes approach. By incorporating these estimated distributions, our method comprehensively accounts for the uncertainties associated with both independent and dependent variables. Our test on both mock data and real astronomical data from PHANGS-ALMA and PHANGS-JWST demonstrates that both the ML based method and the KS-test based method significantly outperform the existing widely-used methods, particularly in cases of low signal-to-noise ratios. The KS-test based method exhibits remarkable robustness against deviations from underlying assumptions, complex intrinsic distributions, varying correlations between uncertainty levels and intrinsic values, inaccuracies in uncertainty estimations, outliers, and saturation effects. We recommend the KS-test based method as the preferred choice for general applications, while the ML based method is suggested for small samples with sizes of N < 100. A GPU-compatible Python implementation of our methods, nicknamed ``raddest'', will be made publicly available upon acceptance of this paper.