Astronomical Data Analysis

Astronomy and astrophysics are highly data-driven research fields: Hypotheses are built upon existing data, models are used to make predictions and discrepancies between theory and observation drive scientific progress, forcing us to either modify existing models or come up with new solutions. In this chapter, we discuss techniques for analysing a variety of data, ranging from individual stellar spectra and light curves to large surveys, such as GAIA. Naturally, file input and output are an important prerequisite for data processing. We conclude with a brief introduction to convolutional neural networks and their application to image data and spectra.