Related papers: Bayesian evidence and predictivity of the inflatio…
Modern scientific cosmology pushes the boundaries of knowledge and the knowable. This is prompting questions on the nature of scientific knowledge. A central issue is what defines a 'good' model. When addressing global properties of the…
The application of Bayesian methods in cosmology and astrophysics has flourished over the past decade, spurred by data sets of increasing size and complexity. In many respects, Bayesian methods have proven to be vastly superior to more…
The Bayesian evidence is a key tool in model selection, allowing a comparison of models with different numbers of parameters. Its use in analysis of cosmological models has been limited by difficulties in calculating it, with current…
We discuss the possibility that the inflationary paradigm, undoubtfully today's best framework to understand all the present cosmological data, may still have some viable challengers. The underlying idea for such discussions is that…
A method is presented for performing joint analyses of cosmological datasets, in which the weight assigned to each dataset is determined directly by it own statistical properties. The weights are considered in a Bayesian context as a set of…
In this thesis we will primarily demonstrate how additional scalar degrees of freedom - which are motivated from many high-energy embeddings - open up new observational windows onto the physics of inflation. We construct a Bayesian…
Bayesian evidence is a standard tool used for comparing the ability of different models to fit available data and is used extensively in cosmology. However, since the evidence calculation involves performing an integral of the likelihood…
We present and discuss a new approach increasing by orders of magnitude the speed of performing Bayesian inference and parameter estimation within the framework of slow-roll inflation. The method relies on the determination of an effective…
How much more will we learn about single-field inflationary models in the future? We address this question in the context of Bayesian design and information theory. We develop a novel method to compute the expected utility of deciding…
The capability of Cosmic Inflation to explain the latest Cosmic Microwave Background and Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation data is assessed by performing Bayesian model comparison within the landscape of nearly three-hundred models of…
There has been much recent discussion, and some confusion, regarding the use of existing observational data to estimate the likelihood that next-generation cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization experiments might detect a nonzero…
We use Bayesian model selection techniques to test extensions of the standard flat LambdaCDM paradigm. Dark-energy and curvature scenarios, and primordial perturbation models are considered. To that end, we calculate the Bayesian evidence…
Inflation has been the driving idea in cosmology for two decades and is a pillar of the New Cosmology. The inflationary paradigm has now passed its first round of significant tests, with two of its three basics predictions confirmed at…
Analyzes of next-generation galaxy data require accurate treatment of systematic effects such as the bias between observed galaxies and the underlying matter density field. However, proposed models of the phenomenon are either numerically…
Bayesian model comparison penalizes models with more free parameters that are allowed to vary over a wide range, and thus offers the most robust method to decide whether some given data require new parameters. In this paper, we ask a simple…
By introducing Crossing functions and hyper-parameters I show that the Bayesian interpretation of the Crossing Statistics [1] can be used trivially for the purpose of model selection among cosmological models. In this approach to falsify a…
Theory testing in the physical sciences has been revolutionized in recent decades by Bayesian approaches to probability theory. Here, I will consider Bayesian approaches to theory extensions, that is, theories like inflation which aim to…
In this paper, using a significantly improved version of the model-independent, cosmographic approach to cosmology (John, M. V. 2004, ApJ, 614, 1), we address an important question: Was there a decelerating past for the universe? To answer…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm. Recent precise observations of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and the matter distribution…
We present the first calculation of the Bayesian evidence for different prototypical single field inflationary scenarios, including representative classes of small field and large field models. This approach allows us to compare…