The luminosity function (LF), i.e. the number of galaxies per unit volume and magnitude interval, is a powerful tool to study galaxy evolution, and it is estimated by virtually any extragalactic survey (see Johnston 2011 for a recent review). It provided the first insights about the emergence of the red population and the star-formation quenching of blue galaxies since z ~ 1 (Bell et al. 2004, Faber et al. 2007). Because of its fundamental significance, we have developed the PROFUSE estimator of the luminosity function.

The PROFUSE estimator of the luminosity function has important advantages with respect to previous ones. Our new method provides a posterior luminosity function, Φ(z, M_B), and (i) naturally accounts for z and M_B uncertainties, (ii) ensures 100% completeness because it works with intrinsic magnitudes instead than with observed ones, (iii) robustly deals with spectral type selections because we can statistically decompose the luminosity function on quiescent and star-forming populations, and (iv) provides a reliable covariance matrix in redshift-magnitude-galaxy type space. Moreover, instead of studying the luminosity function in redshift slices, we created a model in z - M_B that is affected by the same selection as the data, avoiding volume incompleteness, using all the available galaxies to infer the model parameters, and minimising the impact of cosmic variance over the redshift.