The changing landscape of astrostatistics and astroinformatics

TL;DR

The paper reviews the evolution and current state of astrostatistics and astroinformatics, emphasizing the need for advanced statistical methods and computational tools like R in astronomy.

Contribution

It highlights the growing importance of these interdisciplinary fields and discusses how R can facilitate integrating advanced methods into astronomical research.

Findings

Interest in astrostatistics and astroinformatics is rapidly increasing.

Astronomers have limited formal training in these fields.

R can serve as a key software platform for methodological integration.

Abstract

The history and current status of the cross-disciplinary fields of astrostatistics and astroinformatics are reviewed. Astronomers need a wide range of statistical methods for both data reduction and science analysis. With the proliferation of high-throughput telescopes, efficient large scale computational methods are also becoming essential. However, astronomers receive only weak training in these fields during their formal education. Interest in the fields is rapidly growing with conferences organized by scholarly societies, textbooks and tutorial workshops, and research studies pushing the frontiers of methodology. R, the premier language of statistical computing, can provide an important software environment for the incorporation of advanced statistical and computational methodology into the astronomical community.