English

A unified framework for 21cm tomography sample generation and parameter inference with Progressively Growing GANs

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2020-03-04 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Machine Learning

Abstract

Creating a database of 21cm brightness temperature signals from the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR) for an array of reionisation histories is a complex and computationally expensive task, given the range of astrophysical processes involved and the possibly high-dimensional parameter space that is to be probed. We utilise a specific type of neural network, a Progressively Growing Generative Adversarial Network (PGGAN), to produce realistic tomography images of the 21cm brightness temperature during the EoR, covering a continuous three-dimensional parameter space that models varying X-ray emissivity, Lyman band emissivity, and ratio between hard and soft X-rays. The GPU-trained network generates new samples at a resolution of 3\sim 3' in a second (on a laptop CPU), and the resulting global 21cm signal, power spectrum, and pixel distribution function agree well with those of the training data, taken from the 21SSD catalogue \citep{Semelin2017}. Finally, we showcase how a trained PGGAN can be leveraged for the converse task of inferring parameters from 21cm tomography samples via Approximate Bayesian Computation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2002.07940,
  title  = {A unified framework for 21cm tomography sample generation and parameter inference with Progressively Growing GANs},
  author = {Florian List and Geraint F. Lewis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.07940},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

15 pages, 8+1 figures, accepted by MNRAS

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:46:13.591Z