Model fitting and goodness-of-fit in astrophysics

Metro Toronto Convention Centre 

Model fitting with Poisson counting processes and validation has been adopted and put into software packages for high energy physics. The heterogeneous Poisson counting process with a large number of energy bins with zero counts makes traditional large sample approximations inappropriate to use in practice. Numerical solutions have been proposed in the astrophysics literature. Astronomers have always been interested in learning theoretical guarantees of the procedures that they adopt. We study the problem of goodness-of-fit with rigorous statistical methods, and show practical implications of our results with numerical studies.