Astrostatistics References

The field of astrostatistics has been growing rapidly over the past decade or so. If you are new to astrostatistics and would like an overview of the field, we list several references below that may be of interest to read – some are older and some are more recent.

If you know of other good references, please let us know.


  • Loredo, Rice, and Stein. The Annals of Applied Statistics Special Section on Statistics and Astronomy (2009). (link)

  • Feigelson and Babu, “Modern statistical methods for astronomy: with R applications.” Cambridge University Press (2012). (link)

  • Feigelson and Babu, “Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy V.” Springer Science & Business Media (2012). (link)

    • Jogesh Babu and Eric Feigelson have edited several proceedings for the Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy (SCMA) conferences.

  • Hilbe et al. "Life, the universe, and everything." Significance 11.5 (2014): 48-75. (link)

  • Ivezić et al. "Statistics, data mining, and machine learning in astronomy." Statistics, Data Mining, and Machine Learning in Astronomy. Princeton University Press (2014). (link)

  • Schafer, “A Framework for Statistical Inference in Astrophysics.” Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, 2: 141-162 (2015). (link)

  • Feigelson, "The changing landscape of astrostatistics and astroinformatics." Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union 12.S325 (2016): 3-9. (link)

  • Hilbe, De Souza, and Ishida. Bayesian models for astrophysical data: using R, JAGS, Python, and Stan. Cambridge University Press (2017). (link)

  • Algeri et al. "Statistical challenges in the search for dark matter." arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.09273 (2018). (link)

  • Eadie et al. "Realizing the potential of astrostatistics and astroinformatics." arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.11714 (2019). (link)

  • Ntampaka et al. "The role of machine learning in the next decade of cosmology." arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.10159 (2019). (link)

  • Schafer and Cisewski-Kehe, Chance Magazine, Special Issue on Astrostatistics (2019). (link)

  • Siemiginowska et al. "The next decade of astroinformatics and astrostatistics." (2019). (link)