We establish for the first time heuristic correlations between harmonic space phase information and higher order statistics. Using the spherical full-sky maps of the cosmic microwave background as an example we demonstrate that known phase correlations at large spatial scales can gradually be diminished when subtracting a suitable best-fit (Bianchi-) template map of given strength. The weaker phase correlations lead in turn to a vanishing signature of anisotropy when measuring the Minkowski functionals and scaling indices in real-space and comparing them with surrogate maps being free of phase correlations. Those investigations can open a new road to a better understanding of signatures of non-Gaussianities in complex spatial structures by elucidating the meaning of Fourier phase correlations and their influence on higher order statistics.
The theoretical basis for a candidate variational principle for the information bottleneck (IB) method is formulated within the ambit of the generalized nonadditive statistics of Tsallis. Given a nonadditivity parameter $ q $, the role of the textit{additive duality} of nonadditive statistics ($ q^*=2-q $) in relating Tsallis entropies for ranges of the nonadditivity parameter $ q < 1 $ and $ q > 1 $ is described. Defining $ X $, $ tilde X $, and $ Y $ to be the source alphabet, the compressed reproduction alphabet, and, the textit{relevance variable} respectively, it is demonstrated that minimization of a generalized IB (gIB) Lagrangian defined in terms of the nonadditivity parameter $ q^* $ self-consistently yields the textit{nonadditive effective distortion measure} to be the textit{$ q $-deformed} generalized Kullback-Leibler divergence: $ D_{K-L}^{q}[p(Y|X)||p(Y|tilde X)] $. This result is achieved without enforcing any textit{a-priori} assumptions. Next, it is proven that the $q^*-deformed $ nonadditive free energy of the system is non-negative and convex. Finally, the update equations for the gIB method are derived. These results generalize critical features of the IB method to the case of Tsallis statistics.
The unprecedented amount and the excellent quality of lensing data that the upcoming ground- and space-based surveys will produce represent a great opportunity to shed light on the questions that still remain unanswered concerning our universe and the validity of the standard $Lambda$CDM cosmological model. Therefore, it is important to develop new techniques that can exploit the huge quantity of data that future observations will give us access to in the most effective way possible. For this reason, we decided to investigate the development of a new method to treat weak lensing higher order statistics, which are known to break degeneracy among cosmological parameters thanks to their capability of probing the non-Gaussian properties of the shear field. In particular, the proposed method directly applies to the observed quantity, i.e., the noisy galaxy ellipticity. We produced simulated lensing maps with different sets of cosmological parameters and used them to measure higher order moments, Minkowski functionals, Betti numbers, and other statistics related to graph theory. This allowed us to construct datasets with different size, precision, and smoothing. We then applied several machine learning algorithms to determine which method best predicts the actual cosmological parameters associated with each simulation. The best model resulted to be simple multidimensional linear regression. We used this model to compare the results coming from the different datasets and found out that we can measure with good accuracy the majority of the parameters that we considered. We also investigated the relation between each higher order estimator and the different cosmological parameters for several signal-to-noise thresholds and redshifts bins. Given the promising results, we consider this approach as a valuable resource, worth of further development.
Non-parametric imaging and data analysis in astrophysics and cosmology can be addressed by information field theory (IFT), a means of Bayesian, data based inference on spatially distributed signal fields. IFT is a statistical field theory, which permits the construction of optimal signal recovery algorithms. It exploits spatial correlations of the signal fields even for nonlinear and non-Gaussian signal inference problems. The alleviation of a perception threshold for recovering signals of unknown correlation structure by using IFT will be discussed in particular as well as a novel improvement on instrumental self-calibration schemes. IFT can be applied to many areas. Here, applications in in cosmology (cosmic microwave background, large-scale structure) and astrophysics (galactic magnetism, radio interferometry) are presented.
The use of photometric redshifts in cosmology is increasing. Often, however these photo-zs are treated like spectroscopic observations, in that the peak of the photometric redshift, rather than the full probability density function (PDF), is used. This overlooks useful information inherent in the full PDF. We introduce a new real-space estimator for one of the most used cosmological statistics, the 2-point correlation function, that weights by the PDF of individual photometric objects in a manner that is optimal when Poisson statistics dominate. As our estimator does not bin based on the PDF peak it substantially enhances the clustering signal by usefully incorporating information from all photometric objects that overlap the redshift bin of interest. As a real-world application, we measure QSO clustering in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We find that our simplest binned estimator improves the clustering signal by a factor equivalent to increasing the survey size by a factor of 2-3. We also introduce a new implementation that fully weights between pairs of objects in constructing the cross-correlation and find that this pair-weighted estimator improves clustering signal in a manner equivalent to increasing the survey size by a factor of 4-5. Our technique uses spectroscopic data to anchor the distance scale and it will be particularly useful where spectroscopic data (e.g, from BOSS) overlaps deeper photometry (e.g.,from Pan-STARRS, DES or the LSST). We additionally provide simple, informative expressions to determine when our estimator will be competitive with the autocorrelation of spectroscopic objects. Although we use QSOs as an example population, our estimator can and should be applied to any clustering estimate that uses photometric objects.
We present a new formalism to study large-scale structure in the universe. The result is a hierarchy (which we call the Helmholtz Hierarchy) of equations describing the phase space statistics of cold dark matter (CDM). The hierarchy features a physical ordering parameter which interpolates between the Zeldovich approximation and fully-fledged gravitational interactions. The results incorporate the effects of stream crossing. We show that the Helmholtz hierarchy is self-consistent and obeys causality to all orders. We present an interpretation of the hierarchy in terms of effective particle trajectories.