Data_Driven_Astronomy

This repository contains my solutions to the course Data-driven Astronomy offered by The University of Sydney on Coursera.

Contents

Week 1: Thinking about data

• Describe what pulsars are and what causes radio emission from pulsars
• Write code to implement a mean and median stacking algorithm
• Compare possible ways of improving these algorithms

• Calculating the Mean Stack
• Calculating the Median Stack

Week 2: Big data makes things slow

• Describe what supermassive black holes are and what role they play in galaxies
• Write code to implement a cross-matching algorithm
• Understand how to time your code

• A naive cross-matcher
• Cross matching with k-d trees

Week 3: Querying your data

• Describe how exoplanets are detected and what factors affect their habitability
• Write simple SQL statements to query data in a database
• Write more complex SQL queries to join tables in a database

• Writing your own SQL queries
• Joining tables with SQL

Week 4: Managing your data

• Explain how stars form, evolve and die
• Create database tables to organise your data
• Demonstrate how Python and SQL can be used to manage and query data

• Setting up your own database
• Combining SQL with Python

Week 5: Learning from data: regression

• Describe how astronomers calculate distances across a range of cosmological scales
• Write a program to analyse data using a regression classifier
• Analyze the accuracy of a machine learning classifier using 10-fold cross validation.

• Building a regression classifier
• Improving and evaluating our classifier

Week 6: Learning from data: classification

• Explain what causes the wide range of galaxy morphologies we observe
• Write a program to do machine learning classification using decision trees
• Write a program to do machine learning classification using random forests

• Exploring machine learning classification

note: if you're doing the course as well, make sure you don't copy the solutions!

References

Data Driven Astronomy - The University of Sydney

Certificate

Link to Certificate