• [astro-ph:0803.3154]B. G. Elmegreen
  The Stellar Initial Mass Function in 2007: A Year for Discovering Variations

• [astro-ph:0803.3260]J.K. Lawrence, A.C. Cadavid & A. Ruzmaikin
  Rotational quasi periodicities and the Sun – heliosphere connection (I wish arxiv provides keywords. My keywords to this preprint are solar cycle, Lomb-Scargle periodogram, PCA, ICA, all interesting to CHASC folks. Particularly, I felt some similarity to one of stat310 talks about Gravity Probe B)

• [astro-ph:0803.3775] L. Samushia, & B. Ratra
  Constraints on Dark Energy from Galaxy Cluster Gas Mass Fraction versus Redshift data (another example of Monte Carlo Markov Chain, not Markov chain Monte Carlo in the abstract but MCMC is not their research focus)

• [astro-ph:0712.1038]
  Extended Anomalous Foreground Emission in the WMAP 3-Year Data G. Dobler and D. P. Finkbeiner

• [astro-ph:0712.1217]
  Generalized statistical models of voids and hierarchical structure in cosmology A. Z. Mekjian

• [astro-ph:0712.1155]
  The colour-lightcurve shape relation of Type Ia supernovae and the reddening law S. Nobili and A. Goobar

• [astro-ph:0712.1297]
  The Structure of the Local Supercluster of Galaxies Revealed by the Three-Dimensional Voronoi’s Tessellation Method O. V. Melnyk, A. A. Elyiv, and I. B. Vavilova

• [astro-ph:0712.1594]
  Photometric Redshifts with Surface Brightness Priors H. F. Stabenau, A. Connolly and B. Jain

• [stat.ME:0712.1663]
  Efficient Blind Search: Optimal Power of Detection under Computational Cost Constraints N. Meinshausen, P. Bickel and J. Rice

• [astro-ph:0712.1917]
  Are solar cycles predictable? M. Schuessler

Voronoi Tessellation for nonparametric density estimation (mass distribution in the universe) interest me very much. If you are working on the topic, would you kindly share useful informations or write your thoughts on the subject here?

The paper points out that the extreme value theory is scarcely applied in astrophysics; however, extreme events are the most interesting ones in astronomy. Their goal is forecasting solar cycles via statistical tools for extreme values. They adopt the generalized Pareto distribution and estimates parameters of the distribution with a maximum likelihood approach. As a consequence of estimating the cumulative distribution of extreme values, return time (waiting time until an event goes beyond a threshold) and return level (typical extreme event to be discovered) were reported to be matching the empirical distribution of solar cycle. Also, a warning on extrapolating on return times has been given due to the short period of observation (250 years).

Note that the tabulated data is publicly available as the International Sunspot Number. Sunspot number has been a standard example for time series studies but still accept challenges from many scholars.

An additional interesting astronomical paper with a bayesian methodology appeared in arxiv/astro-ph on the same date: arXiv:0703417 MCMC analysis of WMAP3 and SDSS data points to broken symmetry inflation potentials and provides a lower bound on the tensor to scalar ratio by Destri et.al.