English

Sparsity and the Bayesian Perspective

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2015-06-15 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability

Abstract

Sparsity has been recently introduced in cosmology for weak-lensing and CMB data analysis for different applications such as denoising, component separation or inpainting (i.e. filling the missing data or the mask). Although it gives very nice numerical results, CMB sparse inpainting has been severely criticized by top researchers in cosmology, based on arguments derived from a Bayesian perspective. Trying to understand their point of view, we realize that interpreting a regularization penalty term as a prior in a Bayesian framework can lead to erroneous conclusions. This paper is by no means against the Bayesian approach, which has proven to be very useful for many applications, but warns about a Bayesian-only interpretation in data analysis, which can be misleading in some cases.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1302.2758,
  title  = {Sparsity and the Bayesian Perspective},
  author = {J. -L. Starck and D. L. Donoho and M. J. Fadili and A. Rassat},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1302.2758},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

Accepted in A&A

R2 v1 2026-06-21T23:24:43.467Z