scholarly journals Non-Gaussianity in the weak lensing correlation function likelihood – implications for cosmological parameter biases

2020 ◽  
Vol 499 (2) ◽  
pp. 2977-2993
Author(s):  
Chien-Hao Lin ◽  
Joachim Harnois-Déraps ◽  
Tim Eifler ◽  
Taylor Pospisil ◽  
Rachel Mandelbaum ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT We study the significance of non-Gaussianity in the likelihood of weak lensing shear two-point correlation functions, detecting significantly non-zero skewness and kurtosis in 1D marginal distributions of shear two-point correlation functions in simulated weak lensing data. We examine the implications in the context of future surveys, in particular LSST, with derivations of how the non-Gaussianity scales with survey area. We show that there is no significant bias in 1D posteriors of Ωm and σ8 due to the non-Gaussian likelihood distributions of shear correlations functions using the mock data (100 deg2). We also present a systematic approach to constructing approximate multivariate likelihoods with 1D parametric functions by assuming independence or more flexible non-parametric multivariate methods after decorrelating the data points using principal component analysis (PCA). While the use of PCA does not modify the non-Gaussianity of the multivariate likelihood, we find empirically that the 1D marginal sampling distributions of the PCA components exhibit less skewness and kurtosis than the original shear correlation functions. Modelling the likelihood with marginal parametric functions based on the assumption of independence between PCA components thus gives a lower limit for the biases. We further demonstrate that the difference in cosmological parameter constraints between the multivariate Gaussian likelihood model and more complex non-Gaussian likelihood models would be even smaller for an LSST-like survey. In addition, the PCA approach automatically serves as a data compression method, enabling the retention of the majority of the cosmological information while reducing the dimensionality of the data vector by a factor of ∼5.

2019 ◽  
Vol 490 (4) ◽  
pp. 4688-4714 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Rizzato ◽  
Karim Benabed ◽  
Francis Bernardeau ◽  
Fabien Lacasa

ABSTRACT We address key points for an efficient implementation of likelihood codes for modern weak lensing large-scale structure surveys. Specifically, we focus on the joint weak lensing convergence power spectrum–bispectrum probe and we tackle the numerical challenges required by a realistic analysis. Under the assumption of (multivariate) Gaussian likelihoods, we have developed a high performance code that allows highly parallelized prediction of the binned tomographic observables and of their joint non-Gaussian covariance matrix accounting for terms up to the six-point correlation function and supersample effects. This performance allows us to qualitatively address several interesting scientific questions. We find that the bispectrum provides an improvement in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of about 10 per cent on top of the power spectrum, making it a non-negligible source of information for future surveys. Furthermore, we are capable to test the impact of theoretical uncertainties in the halo model used to build our observables; with presently allowed variations we conclude that the impact is negligible on the S/N. Finally, we consider data compression possibilities to optimize future analyses of the weak lensing bispectrum. We find that, ignoring systematics, five equipopulated redshift bins are enough to recover the information content of a Euclid-like survey, with negligible improvement when increasing to 10 bins. We also explore principal component analysis and dependence on the triangle shapes as ways to reduce the numerical complexity of the problem.


Author(s):  
Naonori S Sugiyama ◽  
Shun Saito ◽  
Florian Beutler ◽  
Hee-Jong Seo

Abstract We establish a practical method for the joint analysis of anisotropic galaxy two- and three-point correlation functions (2PCF and 3PCF) on the basis of the decomposition formalism of the 3PCF using tri-polar spherical harmonics. We perform such an analysis with MultiDark Patchy mock catalogues to demonstrate and understand the benefit of the anisotropic 3PCF. We focus on scales above 80 h−1 Mpc, and use information from the shape and the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) signals of the 2PCF and 3PCF. We also apply density field reconstruction to increase the signal-noise ratio of BAO in the 2PCF measurement, but not in the 3PCF measurement. In particular, we study in detail the constraints on the angular diameter distance and the Hubble parameter. We build a model of the bispectrum or 3PCF that includes the nonlinear damping of the BAO signal in redshift space. We carefully account for various uncertainties in our analysis including theoretical models of the 3PCF, window function corrections, biases in estimated parameters from the fiducial values, the number of mock realizations to estimate the covariance matrix, and bin size. The joint analysis of the 2PCF and 3PCF monopole and quadrupole components shows a $30\%$ and $20\%$ improvement in Hubble parameter constraints before and after reconstruction of the 2PCF measurements, respectively, compared to the 2PCF analysis alone. This study clearly shows that the anisotropic 3PCF increases cosmological information from galaxy surveys and encourages further development of the modeling of the 3PCF on smaller scales than we consider.


Author(s):  
Robin E Upham ◽  
Michael L Brown ◽  
Lee Whittaker

Abstract We investigate whether a Gaussian likelihood is sufficient to obtain accurate parameter constraints from a Euclid-like combined tomographic power spectrum analysis of weak lensing, galaxy clustering and their cross-correlation. Testing its performance on the full sky against the Wishart distribution, which is the exact likelihood under the assumption of Gaussian fields, we find that the Gaussian likelihood returns accurate parameter constraints. This accuracy is robust to the choices made in the likelihood analysis, including the choice of fiducial cosmology, the range of scales included, and the random noise level. We extend our results to the cut sky by evaluating the additional non-Gaussianity of the joint cut-sky likelihood in both its marginal distributions and dependence structure. We find that the cut-sky likelihood is more non-Gaussian than the full-sky likelihood, but at a level insufficient to introduce significant inaccuracy into parameter constraints obtained using the Gaussian likelihood. Our results should not be affected by the assumption of Gaussian fields, as this approximation only becomes inaccurate on small scales, which in turn corresponds to the limit in which any non-Gaussianity of the likelihood becomes negligible. We nevertheless compare against N-body weak lensing simulations and find no evidence of significant additional non-Gaussianity in the likelihood. Our results indicate that a Gaussian likelihood will be sufficient for robust parameter constraints with power spectra from Stage IV weak lensing surveys.


Author(s):  
Marika Asgari ◽  
Indiarose Friswell ◽  
Mijin Yoon ◽  
Catherine Heymans ◽  
Andrej Dvornik ◽  
...  

Abstract We present a mitigation strategy to reduce the impact of non-linear galaxy bias on the joint ‘3 × 2pt’ cosmological analysis of weak lensing and galaxy surveys. The Ψ-statistics that we adopt are based on Complete Orthogonal Sets of E/B Integrals (COSEBIs). As such they are designed to minimize the contributions to the observable from the smallest physical scales where models are highly uncertain. We demonstrate that Ψ-statistics carry the same constraining power as the standard two-point galaxy clustering and galaxy-galaxy lensing statistics, but are significantly less sensitive to scale-dependent galaxy bias. Using two galaxy bias models, motivated by halo-model fits to data and simulations, we quantify the error in a standard 3 × 2pt analysis where constant galaxy bias is assumed. Even when adopting conservative angular scale cuts, that degrade the overall cosmological parameter constraints, we find of order 1σ biases for Stage III surveys on the cosmological parameter S8 = σ8(Ωm/0.3)α. This arises from a leakage of the smallest physical scales to all angular scales in the standard two-point correlation functions. In contrast, when analysing Ψ-statistics under the same approximation of constant galaxy bias, we show that the bias on the recovered value for S8 can be decreased by a factor of ∼2, with less conservative scale cuts. Given the challenges in determining accurate galaxy bias models in the highly non-linear regime, we argue that 3 × 2pt analyses should move towards new statistics that are less sensitive to the smallest physical scales.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (12) ◽  
pp. 043-043 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Pyne ◽  
Benjamin Joachimi ◽  
Hiranya V. Peiris

2019 ◽  
Vol 490 (2) ◽  
pp. 1843-1860 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dezső Ribli ◽  
Bálint Ármin Pataki ◽  
José Manuel Zorrilla Matilla ◽  
Daniel Hsu ◽  
Zoltán Haiman ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT Weak gravitational lensing is one of the most promising cosmological probes of the late universe. Several large ongoing (DES, KiDS, HSC) and planned (LSST, Euclid, WFIRST) astronomical surveys attempt to collect even deeper and larger scale data on weak lensing. Due to gravitational collapse, the distribution of dark matter is non-Gaussian on small scales. However, observations are typically evaluated through the two-point correlation function of galaxy shear, which does not capture non-Gaussian features of the lensing maps. Previous studies attempted to extract non-Gaussian information from weak lensing observations through several higher order statistics such as the three-point correlation function, peak counts, or Minkowski functionals. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) emerged in the field of computer vision with tremendous success, and they offer a new and very promising framework to extract information from 2D or 3D astronomical data sets, confirmed by recent studies on weak lensing. We show that a CNN is able to yield significantly stricter constraints of (σ8, Ωm) cosmological parameters than the power spectrum using convergence maps generated by full N-body simulations and ray-tracing, at angular scales and shape noise levels relevant for future observations. In a scenario mimicking LSST or Euclid, the CNN yields 2.4–2.8 times smaller credible contours than the power spectrum, and 3.5–4.2 times smaller at noise levels corresponding to a deep space survey such as WFIRST. We also show that at shape noise levels achievable in future space surveys the CNN yields 1.4–2.1 times smaller contours than peak counts, a higher order statistic capable of extracting non-Gaussian information from weak lensing maps.


2019 ◽  
Vol 488 (2) ◽  
pp. 1652-1678 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hung-Jin Huang ◽  
Tim Eifler ◽  
Rachel Mandelbaum ◽  
Scott Dodelson

Abstract Modifications of the matter power spectrum due to baryonic physics are one of the major theoretical uncertainties in cosmological weak lensing measurements. Developing robust mitigation schemes for this source of systematic uncertainty increases the robustness of cosmological constraints, and may increase their precision if they enable the use of information from smaller scales. Here we explore the performance of two mitigation schemes for baryonic effects in weak lensing cosmic shear: the principal component analysis (PCA) method and the halo-model approach in hmcode. We construct mock tomographic shear power spectra from four hydrodynamical simulations, and run simulated likelihood analyses with cosmolike assuming LSST-like survey statistics. With an angular scale cut of ℓmax < 2000, both methods successfully remove the biases in cosmological parameters due to the various baryonic physics scenarios, with the PCA method causing less degradation in the parameter constraints than hmcode. For a more aggressive ℓmax = 5000, the PCA method performs well for all but one baryonic physics scenario, requiring additional training simulations to account for the extreme baryonic physics scenario of Illustris; hmcode exhibits tensions in the 2D posterior distributions of cosmological parameters due to lack of freedom in describing the power spectrum for $k \gt 10\ h^{-1}\, \mathrm{Mpc}$. We investigate variants of the PCA method and improve the bias mitigation through PCA by accounting for the noise properties in the data via Cholesky decomposition of the covariance matrix. Our improved PCA method allows us to retain more statistical constraining power while effectively mitigating baryonic uncertainties even for a broad range of baryonic physics scenarios.


2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 1407-1430
Author(s):  
J. Kaupužs ◽  
R. V. N. Melnik ◽  
J. Rimšāns

AbstractCorrelation functions in the (n) models below the critical temperature are considered. Based on Monte Carlo (MC) data, we confirm the fact stated earlier by Engels and Vogt, that the transverse two-plane correlation function of the (4) model for lattice sizes about L = 120 and small external fields h is very well described by a Gaussian approximation. However, we show that fits of not lower quality are provided by certain non-Gaussian approximation. We have also tested larger lattice sizes, up to L = 512. The Fourier-transformed transverse and longitudinal two-point correlation functions have Goldstone mode singularities in the thermodynamic limit at k → 0 and h = +0, i.e., G⊥ (k) ≃ ak–λ⊥ and G‖(k)≃bk–λ‖, respectively. Here a and b are the amplitudes, k = |k| is the magnitude of the wave vector k. The exponents λᚆ, λ‖ and the ratio bM2/a2, where M is the spontaneous magnetization, are universal according to the GFD (grouping of Feynman diagrams) approach. Here we find that the universality follows also from the standard (Gaussian) theory, yielding bM2/a2=(n−1)/16. Our MC estimates of this ratio are 0.06±0.01 for n=2, 0.17±0.01 for n = 4 and 0.498±0.010 for n = 10. According to these and our earlier MC results, the asymptotic behavior and Goldstone mode singularities are not exactly described by the standard theory. This is expected from the GFD theory. We have found appropriate analytic approximations for G⊥(k) and G‖(k), well fitting the simulation data for small k. We have used them to test the Patashinski-Pokrovski relation and have found that it holds approximately.


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