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Data compression and galaxy spectra modellingThe quality of spectra of the observed light of unresolved stellar populations has reached enough accuracy that it is possible to make detailed studies of the physical properties of the stellar populations in these galaxies. Excellent examples of this new generation of data sets is given by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at low redshifts and the DEEP2 survey at high redshifts. The rapid extraction of science from such large data sets requires new techniques of data analysis more efficient than those of the past. MOPED is an algorithm developed for Massively Optimised Parameter Estimation and Data compression. It extracts information from a compressed data set. The compression is optimised to contain as much information as possible about the the parameters which define the data. It has been applied to extracting information about the stellar populations of galaxies measured by the Sloan. |