Related papers: Algorithms for bispectra: forecasting, optimal ana…
In this thesis we investigate several aspects related to the theory of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background. We develop a new algorithm to calculate the angular power spectrum of the anisotropies which is two orders of magnitude…
We study the general properties of the CMB temperature four-point function, specifically its harmonic analogue the angular trispectrum, and illustrate its utility in finding optimal quadratic statistics through the weak gravitational…
We revisit the problem of computing submatrices of the Cram\'er-Rao bound (CRB), which lower bounds the variance of any unbiased estimator of a vector parameter $\vth$. We explore iterative methods that avoid direct inversion of the Fisher…
The statistical analysis of the soon to come Planck satellite CMB data will help set tighter bounds on major cosmological parameters. On the way, a number of practical difficulties need to be tackled, notably that several other…
As the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation is observed to higher and higher angular resolution the size of the resulting datasets becomes a serious constraint on their analysis. In particular current algorithms to determine the…
We use the large cosmological Millennium Simulation (MS) to construct the first all-sky maps of the lensing potential and the deflection angle, aiming at gravitational lensing of the CMB, with the goal of properly including small-scale…
Destriping methods for constructing maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies have been investigated extensively in the literature. However, their error properties have been studied in less detail. Here we present an…
We undertake a thorough search for signatures of sharp oscillatory features in the WMAP9 power spectrum and bispectrum as well as in the Planck power spectrum. For the first time, we carry out searches in both the power spectrum and…
This paper addresses the issue of model selection for hidden Markov models (HMMs). We generalize factorized asymptotic Bayesian inference (FAB), which has been recently developed for model selection on independent hidden variables (i.e.,…
We demonstrate how to obtain optimal constraints on a primordial gravitational wave component in lensed Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data under ideal conditions. We first derive an estimator of the tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r$, by using…
Matrix factorization is a popular approach to solving matrix estimation problems based on partial observations. Existing matrix factorization is based on least squares and aims to yield a low-rank matrix to interpret the conditional sample…
We present a formalism for performance forecasting and optimization of future cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. We implement it in the context of nearly full sky, multifrequency, B-mode polarization observations, incorporating…
We present a cross-spectra based approach for the analysis of CMB data at large angular scales to constrain the reionization optical depth $\tau$, the tensor to scalar ratio $r$ and the amplitude of the primordial scalar perturbations…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons are deflected by large-scale structure through gravitational lensing. This secondary effect introduces higher-order correlations in CMB anisotropies, which are used to reconstruct lensing…
The Quadratic Maximum Likelihood estimator can be used to reconstruct the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) power spectra with minimal error bars. Still, it requires an accurate estimate of the datasets noise covariance matrix in order to…
It is widely believed that maximum likelihood estimators must be used to provide optimal estimates of power spectra. Since such estimators require require of order N_d^3 operations they are computationally prohibitive for N_d greater than a…
Gravitational-wave astronomers often wish to characterize the expected parameter-estimation accuracy of future observations. The Fisher matrix provides a lower bound on the spread of the maximum-likelihood estimator across noise…
The next generation of ground-based CMB experiments aim to measure temperature and polarization fluctuations up to $\ell_{\rm max} \approx 5000$ over half of the sky. Combined with Planck data on large scales, this will provide improved…
The purpose of this text is to provide an accessible introduction to a set of recently developed algorithms for factorizing matrices. These new algorithms attain high practical speed by reducing the dimensionality of intermediate…
Upcoming surveys will measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB) weak lensing power spectrum in exquisite detail, allowing for strong constraints on the sum of neutrino masses among other cosmological parameters. Standard CMB lensing…