The great’08 Pascal challenge

In order to make advances in the processing of their datasets and experiments, and in the understanding of the fundamental parameters driving the general relativity model, cosmologists are lauching a competition called the great’08 challenge through the Pascal European network. Details about the challenge are available on an arXiv:0802.1214 document, the model being clearly defined from a statistical point of view as a combination of lensing shear (the phenomenon of interest) and of various (=three) convolution noises that make the analysis so challenging, and the date being a collection of images of galaxies. The fundamental problem is to identify a 2d-linear distortion applied to all images within a certain region of the space, up (or down) to a precision of 0.003, the distortion being identified by an isotonic assumption over the un-distrorted images. The solution must be efficient too in that it is to be tested on 27 million galaxies! A standard MCMC mixture analysis on each galaxy is thus unlikely to converge before the challenge is over, next April. I think the challenge is worth considering by statistical teams, even though this represents a considerable involvement over the next six months….