Issue |
A&A
Volume 621, January 2019
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A69 | |
Number of page(s) | 18 | |
Section | Cosmology (including clusters of galaxies) | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201834117 | |
Published online | 11 January 2019 |
Cosmological inference from Bayesian forward modelling of deep galaxy redshift surveys
1
Sorbonne Université, CNRS, UMR 7095, Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, 98 bis bd Arago, 75014 Paris, France
e-mail: ramanah@iap.fr
2
Sorbonne Universités, Institut Lagrange de Paris (ILP), 98 bis bd Arago, 75014 Paris, France
3
The Oskar Klein Centre, Department of Physics, Stockholm University, AlbaNova University Centre, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
4
Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute, 162 5th Avenue, 10010 New York, NY, USA
Received:
22
August
2018
Accepted:
7
November
2018
We present a large-scale Bayesian inference framework to constrain cosmological parameters using galaxy redshift surveys, via an application of the Alcock-Paczyński (AP) test. Our physical model of the non-linearly evolved density field, as probed by galaxy surveys, employs Lagrangian perturbation theory (LPT) to connect Gaussian initial conditions to the final density field, followed by a coordinate transformation to obtain the redshift space representation for comparison with data. We have implemented a Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampler to generate realisations of three-dimensional (3D) primordial and present-day matter fluctuations from a non-Gaussian LPT-Poissonian density posterior given a set of observations. This hierarchical approach encodes a novel AP test, extracting several orders of magnitude more information from the cosmic expansion compared to classical approaches, to infer cosmological parameters and jointly reconstruct the underlying 3D dark matter density field. The novelty of this AP test lies in constraining the comoving-redshift transformation to infer the appropriate cosmology which yields isotropic correlations of the galaxy density field, with the underlying assumption relying purely on the geometrical symmetries of the cosmological principle. Such an AP test does not rely explicitly on modelling the full statistics of the field. We verified in depth via simulations that this renders our test robust to model misspecification. This leads to another crucial advantage, namely that the cosmological parameters exhibit extremely weak dependence on the currently unresolved phenomenon of galaxy bias, thereby circumventing a potentially key limitation. This is consequently among the first methods to extract a large fraction of information from statistics other than that of direct density contrast correlations, without being sensitive to the amplitude of density fluctuations. We perform several statistical efficiency and consistency tests on a mock galaxy catalogue, using the SDSS-III survey as template, taking into account the survey geometry and selection effects, to validate the Bayesian inference machinery implemented.
Key words: methods: data analysis / methods: statistical / cosmology: observations / large-scale structure of Universe / galaxies: statistics
© ESO 2019
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.