Why is statistics important for Astronomers? In the context of the era of Big Data, I will show how can the correct statistical approaches help solve real astrophysical problems (e.g. de Souza et al., 2017, 2016; Hilbe et al., 2017), given my experience within the International Astrostatistics Association (IAA) and, specially, its most active working group, the Cosmostatistics Initiative (COIN). I will, furthermore, address a little bit about the relevance of these institutions, given a historical perspective.

 References

de Souza, R. S., Dantas, M. L. L., Costa-Duarte, M. V., Feigelson, E. D., Killedar, M., Lablanche, P.-Y., Vilalta, R., Krone-Martins, A., Beck, R., and Gieseke, F. (2017). A probabilistic approach to emission-line galaxy classification. MNRAS.

de Souza, R. S., Dantas, M. L. L., Krone-Martins, A., Cameron, E., Coelho, P., Hattab, M. W., de Val-Borro, M., Hilbe, J. M., Elliott, J., Hagen, A., and COIN Collaboration (2016). Is the cluster environment quenching the Seyfert activity in elliptical and spiral galaxies? MNRAS, 461:2115–2125.

Hilbe, J., de Souza, R., and Ishida, E. (2017). Bayesian Models for Astrophysical Data: Using R, JAGS, Python, and Stan. Cambridge University Press.