Space-Time Spherical Random Fields and their Applications to Astrostatistics
This project is devoted to the probabilistic and statistical investigation of spherical random fields evolving over time, with a view to applications in Cosmology and Astrostatistics.
In an astrophysical context, the analysis of spherical random fields has been strongly motivated in the last few years by satellite missions producing spherical maps of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. In the very near future, other experiments will produce spherical maps depending also on a "time" parameter, so random fields whose domain is the sphere cross time are going to become of the greatest statistical interest. For instance, the LSST observatory will produce over the next decade more than 1000 temporal images of the celestial sphere. Among our objectives, we mention the development of spherical-temporal wavelets and the investigation of their dependence structure; their application to parametric and nonparametric statistical issues; the characterization of Gaussianity, isotropy and stationarity. We aim also at the implementation of some of these new techniques into realistic experimental settings, so that they might become new tools for effective data analysis in this area.