Fisher Score Matching for Simulation-Based Forecasting and Inference
Abstract
We propose a method for estimating the Fisher score--the gradient of the log-likelihood with respect to model parameters--using score matching. By introducing a latent parameter model, we show that the Fisher score can be learned by training a neural network to predict latent scores via a mean squared error loss. We validate our approach on a toy linear Gaussian model and a cosmological example using a differentiable simulator. In both cases, the learned scores closely match ground truth for plausible data-parameter pairs. This method extends the ability to perform Fisher forecasts, and gradient-based Bayesian inference to simulation models, even when they are not differentiable; it therefore has broad potential for advancing cosmological analyses.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2507.07833,
title = {Fisher Score Matching for Simulation-Based Forecasting and Inference},
author = {Ce Sui and Shivam Pandey and Benjamin D. Wandelt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.07833},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted to the 2025 Workshop on Machine Learning for Astrophysics. Code available at: https://github.com/suicee/FisherScoreMatching