Speaker: Eduardo Rozo (University of Arizona)
"A Field-Based Inference Approach to Cosmic Shear"
All cosmological analyses to date rely on summary statistics: given a map of the survey data (e.g. a galaxy density map), one first computes a set of summary statistics (e.g. the correlation function), and then one proceeds to fit only that particular set of summary statistics. This approach is necessarily wasteful: some information is always lost in going from the survey map to the set of summary statistics under consideration. In this talk, I will describe a new approach referred to as field-based inference, in which one seeks to model not summary statistics, but the survey maps themselves. I will demonstrate field-based inference methods are expected to double the amount of information we can extract from current and future surveys, and discuss some of the challenges that remain to usher in a new era of field-based inference.
