An Introduction on Solar Imaging Data Analytic Challenges and Opportunities for Statisticians

We give a gentle introduction to solar imaging data, focusing on challenges and opportunities of data-driven approaches for solar eruptions. The various solar phenomena prediction problems that might benefit from statistical methods are presented. Available data and software will be described. State-of-art solar eruption forecasting with data driven approaches are summarized and discussed. Based on the characteristics of the datasets and state-of-art approaches, we point out several promising directions to explore from statistical modeling and computational perspectives.