English

Kosmulator: A Python framework for cosmological inference with MCMC

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2026-02-10 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We present Kosmulator, a modular and vectorised Python framework designed to accelerate the statistical testing of cosmological models. As the theoretical landscape expands beyond standard Λ\LambdaCDM, implementing new expansion histories into traditional Einstein--Boltzmann solvers becomes a significant computational bottleneck. Kosmulator addresses this by leveraging array-native execution and efficient ensemble slice sampling (via Zeus) to perform rapid Bayesian inference. We validate the framework against the industry-standard Cobaya code using a combination of Type Ia Supernovae, Cosmic Chronometers, and Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) data. Our results demonstrate that Kosmulator reproduces Cobaya's posterior constraints to within 0.3σ\leq0.3\sigma statistical agreement on H0H_{0} and Ωm\Omega_{m} and <0.6%<0.6\% precision on χ2\chi^{2}, while achieving a 4.5×\sim 4.5\times reduction in wall-clock time on a single CPU core compared to a standard MPI-parallelised baseline. Furthermore, we showcase the framework's utility by constraining the implicit power-law f(Q)f(Q) "f1f_1CDM" model and demonstrating its automated model selection capabilities (AIC/BIC). Kosmulator is introduced as a "scientific sieve" for rapid hypothesis testing, allowing researchers to efficiently filter theoretical candidates before deploying high-precision resources.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.08424,
  title  = {Kosmulator: A Python framework for cosmological inference with MCMC},
  author = {Renier T. Hough and Robert Rugg and Shambel Sahlu and Amare Abebe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.08424},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

12 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, 3 Python listings, Submitted for publication in the South African Gravity Society (SAGS) 2025 conference proceedings