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The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) satellite has been in orbit since 2008 and detects energy-resolved energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) originating from the heliosphere. Different regions of the heliosphere generate ENAs at different rates. It is of scientific interest to take the data collected by IBEX and estimate spatial maps of heliospheric ENA rates (referred to as sky maps) at higher resolutions than before. These sky maps will subsequently be used to discern between competing theories of heliosphere properties that are not currently possible. The data IBEX collects present challenges to sky map estimation. The two primary challenges are noisy and irregularly spaced data collection and the IBEX instrumentation's point spread function. In essence, the data collected by IBEX are both noisy and biased for the underlying sky map of inferential interest. In this article, we present a two-stage sky map estimation procedure called Theseus. In Stage 1, Theseus estimates a blurred sky map from the noisy and irregularly spaced data using an ensemble approach that leverages projection pursuit regression and generalized additive models. In Stage 2, Theseus deblurs the sky map by deconvolving the PSF with the blurred map using regularization. Unblurred sky map uncertainties are computed via bootstrapping. We compare Theseus to a method closely related to the one operationally used today by the IBEX Science Operation Center (ISOC) on both simulated and real data. Theseus outperforms ISOC in nearly every considered metric on simulated data, indicating that Theseus is an improvement over the current state of the art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Missing data are prevalent issue in analyses involving data collection. The problem of missing data is exacerbated for multisource analysis, where data from multiple sensors are combined to arrive at a single conclusion. In this scenario, it is more likely to occur and can lead to discarding a large amount of data collected; however, the information from observed sensors can be leveraged to estimate those values not observed. We propose two methods for imputation of multisource data, both of which take advantage of potential correlation between data from different sensors, through ridge regression and a state‐space model. These methods, as well as the common median imputation, are applied to data collected from a variety of sensors monitoring an experimental facility. Performance of imputation methods is compared with the mean absolute deviation; however, rather than using this metric to solely rank the methods, we also propose an approach to identify significant differences. Imputation techniques will also be assessed by their ability to produce appropriate confidence intervals, through coverage and length, around the imputed values. Finally, performance of imputed datasets is compared with a marginalized dataset through a weighted k‐means clustering. In general, we found that imputation through a dynamic linear model tended to be the most accurate and to produce the most precise confidence intervals, and that imputing the missing values and down weighting them with respect to observed values in the analysis led to the most accurate performance. Published 2017. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]