Related papers: Occam's razor meets WMAP
The low multipole anomalies of the Cosmic Microwave Background has received much attention during the last few years. It is still not ascertained whether these anomalies are indeed primordial or the result of systematics or foregrounds. An…
The observed angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropy, $C_l$, is a convolution of a cosmological radiative transport kernel with an assumed primordial power spectrum of inhomogeneities. Exquisite…
Prompted by misconceptions in the recent literature, we review the justifications for naturalness arguments and Occam's razor found in Bayesian statistics. We discuss the automatic Occam's razor that emerges in Bayesian formalism, bringing…
With a wariness of Occam's razor awakened by the discovery of cosmic acceleration, we abandon the usual assumption of zero mean curvature and ask how well it can be determined by planned surveys. We also explore the impact of uncertain mean…
We perform a cross-correlation of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) using the third year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data with the 2 Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) galaxy map (about 828 000 galaxies with median redshift z…
QCD corrections to the electron positron annihilation cross-section into hadrons and to the hadronic $Z$ boson decay rate are reviewed. Formal developments are introduced in a form particularly suited for practical applications. These…
Matrix completion and approximation are popular tools to capture a user's preferences for recommendation and to approximate missing data. Instead of using low-rank factorization we take a drastically different approach, based on the simple…
Noticeable deviations from the prediction of the fiducial LCDM cosmology are found in the angular power spectrum of the CMB. Besides large-angle anomalies, the WMAP 1st year data revealed a dip in the power spectrum at l \sim 200, which…
This work studies finite-sample properties of the risk of the minimum-norm interpolating predictor in high-dimensional regression models. If the effective rank of the covariance matrix $\Sigma$ of the $p$ regression features is much larger…
A general relationship is formulated between the contributions of `Weak Annihilation' (WA) to inclusive semileptonic decays of heavy flavour hadrons and the matrix elements of four fermion operators. We argue that nonperturbative…
The purpose of this effort is to investigate if the use of quaternion mathematics can be used to better model and simulate the electromagnetic fields that occur from moving electromagnetic charges. One observed deficiency with the commonly…
We present the analysis on the quadrupole phases of the Internal Linear Combination map, ILC(I) and (III) derived by the WMAP team (1 and 3-year data release). This approach allows us to see the global trend of non-Gaussianity of the…
Models in which the covariance matrix has the structure of a sparse matrix plus a low rank perturbation are ubiquitous in data science applications. It is often desirable for algorithms to take advantage of such structures, avoiding costly…
Copi, Huterer, Starkman and Schwarz introduced multipole vectors in a tensor context and used them to demonstrate that the first-year WMAP quadrupole and octopole planes align at roughly the 99.9% confidence level. In the present article…
Propensity score trimming, which discards subjects with propensity scores below a threshold, is a common way to address positivity violations that complicate causal effect estimation. However, most works on trimming assume treatment is…
To assess the significance and scale dependence of anomalous large scale modes in the CatWISE quasar data, we generate smoothed number density fields on the sphere and study their extreme values -- maximum, minimum, maximum antipodal…
We develop a model selection approach to tackle reinforcement learning with adversarial corruption in both transition and reward. For finite-horizon tabular MDPs, without prior knowledge on the total amount of corruption, our algorithm…
Recently a symmetry-based method to test for statistical isotropy of the cosmic microwave background was developed. We apply the method to template-cleaned 3-year and 5-year WMAP-$DA$ maps. We examine a wide range of angular multipoles from…
The all-sky 408 MHz map of Haslam et al. is one the most important total-power radio surveys. It has been widely used to study diffuse synchrotron radiation from our Galaxy and as a template to remove foregrounds in cosmic microwave…
The latest cosmological data seem to indicate a significant deviation from scale invariance of the primordial power spectrum when parameterized either by a power law or by a spectral index with non-zero "running". This deviation, by itself,…