Frequentist confidence intervals for orbits

Author: Lucy L. B.  

Publisher: Edp Sciences

E-ISSN: 1432-0746|565|issue|A37-A37

ISSN: 0004-6361

Source: Astronomy & Astrophysics, Vol.565, Iss.issue, 2014-04, pp. : A37-A37

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Abstract

The problem of efficiently computing the orbital elements of a visual binary while still deriving confidence intervals with frequentist properties is treated. When formulated in terms of the Thiele-Innes elements, the known distribution of probability in Thiele-Innes space allows efficient grid-search plus Monte-Carlo-sampling schemes to be constructed for both the minimum-χ2 and the Bayesian approaches to parameter estimation. Numerical experiments with 104 independent realizations of an observed orbit confirm that the 1 − and 2σ confidence and credibility intervals have coverage fractions close to their frequentist values.