Meet Ryan Feyter – Statistics Summer Scholarship recipient

This summer, we have a number of fantastic students who received a Department of Statistics scholarship to work on fascinating projects with our staff members. We’ll be profiling them here on Stats Chat and we’d love to hear your feedback on their projects!

Ryan is working with Brendon Brewer on a research project entitled ‘Uncertainty in faint astronomical images’.

Ryan explains:

“Astronomers often take images of the sky, then look for objects such as stars or galaxies in these images. It is of interest to measure the “flux” or total brightness of the objects, which is then used as input to scientific studies. However, this cannot be done accurately because the images are noisy, especially when they are of very faint distant objects such as the first galaxies in the universe.

“Two approaches for estimating flux are in common use. One is to simply add the image pixel values together and use that to estimate the total flux. A more sophisticated approach is to try to infer the underlying noise-free image of the object (using Bayesian methods), and then to calculate the flux of the noise-free image. This second approach is harder and requires more assumptions, but is likely to be more accurate.

“Our project is using simulations to investigate exactly how much more accurate the sophisticated approach is, and whether this remains true even when incorrect assumptions are used.”

More about Ryan:

“I have just finished a Bachelor of Science degree in Statistics and Maths. Next year I will be starting a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Statistics. Having done statistics and maths has significantly improved my thinking and problem-solving abilities, which has been useful for projects like the one I’m currently involved in and (hopefully) are very desirable traits to have in the workforce.

“I like stats because it can be useful in almost any industry. Almost anything we do produces some data which will then need to be analysed. I have found stats to be the most enjoyable subject I have studied due to the great lecturers and the material having a lot of relevance to real-life problems.

“In my spare time this summer I’ll be spending some time in Christchurch with the family, seeing friends, probably doing a lot of relaxing and playing computer games!”