We revisit the problem of exact CMB likelihood and power spectrum estimation with the goal of minimizing computational cost through linear compression. This idea was originally proposed for CMB purposes by Tegmark et al. (1997), and here we develop it into a fully working computational framework for large-scale polarization analysis, adopting WMAP as a worked example. We compare five different linear bases (pixel space, harmonic space, noise covariance eigenvectors, signal-to-noise covariance eigenvectors and signal-plus-noise covariance eigenvectors) in terms of compression efficiency, and find that the computationally most efficient basis is the signal-to-noise eigenvector basis, which is closely related to the Karhunen-Loeve and Principal Component transforms, in agreement with previous suggestions. For this basis, the information in 6836 unmasked WMAP sky map pixels can be compressed into a smaller set of 3102 modes, with a maximum error increase of any single multipole of 3.8% at $ellle32$, and a maximum shift in the mean values of a joint distribution of an amplitude--tilt model of 0.006$sigma$. This compression reduces the computational cost of a single likelihood evaluation by a factor of 5, from 38 to 7.5 CPU seconds, and it also results in a more robust likelihood by implicitly regularizing nearly degenerate modes. Finally, we use the same compression framework to formulate a numerically stable and computationally efficient variation of the Quadratic Maximum Likelihood implementation that requires less than 3 GB of memory and 2 CPU minutes per iteration for $ell le 32$, rendering low-$ell$ QML CMB power spectrum analysis fully tractable on a standard laptop.
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