The main focus of this presentation is introducing astrostatistics from my personal experience. In the first decade of the 21st century, I was trying to find research topics that incorporate statistics and information science that I learned from PSU, astronomy here at SNU, and astrostatistics from Harvard/CfA. Nowadays these kind works are apt to be called Big Data. From the astrophysicists’ perspective, the depth of these works might sound rudimentary but most of topics I discuss in this presentation happened to appear in the journals and conferences.
Most of topics in this presentation were possible thanks to the conversation with late Leo Breiman in 2001 at the SCMA conference, which I’d like to discuss. As we all know, Astronomy has been forerunners that lead to new technologies thanks to its openness. Surely, in the era of Big Data, astronomers have been the pioneers of Big Data, whose efforts that I partially experienced will be presented. If time allows I will show some statistical misuses found in astronomical journals in addition to the notion of Bayesian statistics why it gained popularity among astronomers. Lastly, a little about data science policy will be discussed.