English

Bayesian Simulation-based Inference for Cosmological Initial Conditions

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2023-11-01 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Machine Learning

Abstract

Reconstructing astrophysical and cosmological fields from observations is challenging. It requires accounting for non-linear transformations, mixing of spatial structure, and noise. In contrast, forward simulators that map fields to observations are readily available for many applications. We present a versatile Bayesian field reconstruction algorithm rooted in simulation-based inference and enhanced by autoregressive modeling. The proposed technique is applicable to generic (non-differentiable) forward simulators and allows sampling from the posterior for the underlying field. We show first promising results on a proof-of-concept application: the recovery of cosmological initial conditions from late-time density fields.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.19910,
  title  = {Bayesian Simulation-based Inference for Cosmological Initial Conditions},
  author = {Florian List and Noemi Anau Montel and Christoph Weniger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.19910},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted for the NeurIPS 2023 workshop Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences; 5 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:06:32.447Z