Unified radio interferometric calibration and imaging with joint uncertainty quantification

¹ Max-Planck Institut für Astrophysik, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 1, Garching, Germany
e-mail: parras@mpa-garching.mpg.de
² Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, München, Germany
³ Technische Universität München (TUM), Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748 Garching, Germany

Received: 26 March 2019
Accepted: 6 June 2019

Abstract

The data reduction procedure for radio interferometers can be viewed as a combined calibration and imaging problem. We present an algorithm that unifies cross-calibration, self-calibration, and imaging. Because it is a Bayesian method, this algorithm not only calculates an estimate of the sky brightness distribution, but also provides an estimate of the joint uncertainty which entails both the uncertainty of the calibration and that of the actual observation. The algorithm is formulated in the language of information field theory and uses Metric Gaussian Variational Inference (MGVI) as the underlying statistical method. So far only direction-independent antenna-based calibration is considered. This restriction may be released in future work. An implementation of the algorithm is contributed as well.