[adwi]

> The Gini coefficient is normally used to measure how the light in an image of a galaxy is distributed among its pixels. This measurement is made by ordering the pixels that make up the image of a galaxy in ascending order by flux and then comparing the result to what would be expected from a perfectly even flux distribution.

Interesting, I’d only heard of the Gini coefficient as an econometric measure of income inequality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

[ploika]

Some decision tree algorithms use it to decide what variable to split on when creating new branches.

[buildsjets]

Also found it interesting, but for it's technical merits, as I recently had to glue some code together to analyze/compare droplet size from still frames of a high speed video of a pressurized nozzle spraying a flammable fluid. (into a fire! neat! fire! FIRE!)

This approach might have been useful to try. I ended up finding a way to use ImageJ, an open source tool published by the NIH that biologists use to automatically count bacterial colony-forming units growing on petri dishes, but it was very slow and hacky. It was not perfect, but it gave an objective way to quantify information from a large body of existing test data with zero budget. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageJ