The EDGE-CALIFA Survey: Exploring the Star Formation Law through
  Variable Selection
  We present a multilinear analysis to determine the significant predictors of
star formation in galaxies using the combined EDGE-CALIFA sample of galaxies.
We analyze 1845 kpc-scale lines of sight across 39 galaxies with molecular line
emission measurements from EDGE combined with optical IFU data drawn from
CALIFA. We use the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) to
identify significant factors in predicting star formation rates. We find that
the local star formation rate surface density is increased by higher molecular
gas surface densities and stellar surface densities. In contrast, we see lower
star formation rates in systems with older stellar populations, higher gas- and
stellar-phase metallicities and larger galaxy masses. We also find a
significant increase in star formation rate with galactocentric radius
normalized by the disk scale length, which suggests additional parameters
regulating star formation rate not explored in this study.
