[home]     [professional]     [personal]     [resume] Project: "Estimating the true number of Pulsars" [Brief Write-up for Chunglee Kim] Abstract: I met Chunglee Kim, a PhD student in Astrophysics at Northwestern University, at the SAMSI program on Astrostatistics Kickoff Tutorials & Workshops in January of 2006. We had a lot of fun together at the conference and were lucky enough to sit next to eachother on the plan ride back to Chicago. On the way home she told me about her dissertation research and we discussed some of the statistics involved. She was interested in estimating the number of pulsars that existed within a fixed volume of the universe. Her data consisted of the number of pulsars that had been observed, and she had a physical model that described the way that the pulsars orientation and other physical properties would affect the ability to view it from earth. She was also able to simulate random pulsars under this model and estimate/observe the proportion of simulated pulsars that would be observed from Earth. I suggested that she think about the number of pulsars observed, X, as a sample from a binomial distribution, X~Bin(N,p), where the true number of trials, N, is unknown but the proportion p of pulsars observed can be well-estimated via simulation. My brief letter to Chunglee is attached below, and it describes my suggestions for how she could estimate N and provide a reasonable confidence interval.